Homer journalist and writer Tom Kizzia on Tuesday, Dec. 17 was presented with a state legislative citation award by Rep. Andrew Gray. The award honors Kizzia’s contributions to Alaska literature through both published non-fiction books and Alaska public media.

Gray, an Anchorage Democrat, was the primary sponsor for the award. The award was co-sponsored by Fairbanks Republican Sen. Click Bishop, who represents Fairbanks . Homer Rep. Sarah Vance was also in attendance for the award presentation, which took place before an author’s talk “Imagining the Past” at Homer Public Library.

“Imagining the Past” included discussion between Kizzia and novelist Rich Chiappone to share various joys and challenges in addressing history from various venues of writing.

Kizzia wrote “Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska.” Published in 2021, the novel tells the history of the community from 1938 until 1983. Kizzia, who was working for the Anchorage Daily News at the time, first visited the community in 1983 after a mass shooting that killed six people and injured two. The shooting was an attempt to disrupt the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), according to reporting from Kizzia for the Anchorage Daily News. Louis Hastings was senteced to 634 years in prison for the crime, according to an Anchorage Daily News article from Jul. 18, 1984, composed by Kizzia.

In addition to his legislative employment and responsibilities, Gray produces a weekly Anchorage podcast, the East Anchorage Book Club podcast, and he has interviewed Kizzia three times related to his various publications.

“I want to relay a quote that I just saw on social media. It said that ‘we want a government that fears our press, not a press that fears our government’. Tom Kizzia was a fearless reporter,” Gray said. “I will never forget reading about landing in McCarthy with body bags lining the runway.”

Kizzia was also a very “moral” reporter, Gray said, referring to the book “Pilgrim’s Wilderness: A true story of faith and madness on the Alaska Frontier.” This book was publised in 2013 and Kizzia website review explains, “when Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family’s proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Papa Pilgrim’s dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico.”

Gray had the opportunity to interview Kizzia about that book when it was published in 2013 and Gray said prior to the interview he had received many questions about the 15 Pilgrim children.

“Tom stopped me as soon as I asked about them and said, ‘I’m not going to talk about those kids. They didn’t ask to be in that environment and they are not a part of the story anymore’,” Gray said.

In one of Gray’s most recent podcasts, produced Oct. 27, Kizzia spoke about “Josie’s Story,” an eight-part series published beginning in October in the Anchorage Daily News.

The series follows the life of Josie Rudolph, who was born in Sitka in 1869 to German-Jewish parents but moved back to Germany when she was still a child. Sixty-nine years later in Nuremberg, it was Josie’s Alaska birth that saved her from the Nazis, Gray said.

Gray also spoke about what he said was the moral storytelling of Kizzia’s first book, “Wake of the Unseen Object,” published in 1991.

The book grew out of a series of journalism pieces that Kizzia originally proposed to ADN editors to bring back to Anchorage readers stories of remote Alaska bush. The stories were originally composed under the series title, “Northcountry Journal.” The book was reprinted in 2020 and includes an update from Kizzia describing some of the changes from the original publication.

In the reprint, “we saw the stories for what they were, a rough draft of history. Kizzia had written a history book without knowing it, because much of that life that he described in the northern communities is no longer there,” Gray said.