True North

Kathryn Olmstead is a former Bangor Daily News columnist and editor/ publisher of Echoes magazine, based in Caribou, Maine, which she co-founded in 1988. She served 25 years on the journalism faculty of the University of Maine in Orono, the last six as associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her writing also has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The World and I, American Journalism Review, Maine Townsman and Islandport Magazine. She also co-authored a WWII memoir Flight to Freedom: World War II Through the Eyes of a Child with Bangor portrait photographer Philomena Baker published on 2013. She was the founding director of the Maine Center for Student Journalism, based at UMaine, for high school journalists and their advisors from 1993 to 2003. Before joining the University of Maine faculty, she was a correspondent for the Bangor Daily News, editor of the Aroostook Republican weekly newspaper in Caribou, an agricultural columnist for regional and national newspapers in Vermont and Kansas, and district representative for US Senator Bill Cohen. A native of Battle Creek, Michigan, she earned a bachelor of arts in English from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and a master of arts in English and education from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She taught English and journalism in Wisconsin and New Hampshire before moving to Maine in 1974.  

"American essayist Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) once wrote: 'What I like in an author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.' That thoughtful comment aptly describes the writing of Caribou author Kathryn Olmstead [...] “True North” is a collection of 39 previously published essays about the county, covering nearly 30 years of thoughts, observations and commentary, “whispered” carefully in her vivid prose."— Bill Bushnell, Bushnell on Books, The Kennebec Journal