2025 Project Award

X̱’unei Lance Twitchell is working on his first novel, touching on the history of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The story centers on a family trying to survive in a violent colonial world while holding onto and supporting each other. He will fully draft the novel, build out a working network of playwrights, poets, screenwriters and authors to gain feedback, and develop a publishing plan once the novel is near completion. 

When asked what he would like the public to know, Twitchell responded, “I am a multimedia artist working on my first novel. I have published a book of poetry and was a writer for Molly of Denali. In my writing I draw inspiration from other writers, and also find in them a lot of confidence to keep going and to be open to finding new ideas. For the past thirty years I have had a number of creative writing teachers who were warm and inviting, and some of them are no longer with us physically but I keep them in my heart. It is such an honor to be among some of the finest writers in the state, and I communicate with a network of playrights, poets, screenwriters, and writers of fiction and non-fiction. I communicate regularly with Vera Starbard, Frank Katasse, Don Reardon, Ernestine Hayes, Emily Wall, and Jonas Lamb on a regular basis about current and future works. I also am on the planning faculty for North Words, Writers Symposium which happens annually in my hometown of Skagway, Alaska.”

X̱’unei Lance Twitchell at the 2025 Children’s & Family Emmy® Awards in Los Angeles where he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Series for his work in “Molly of Denali.”

The cover of Twitchell’s book “G̱agaanX̱ʼusyee, Below the Foot of the Sun.”

2021 Fellowship Award

Twitchell will collaborate with fellow Indigenous screenwriters as creative consultants to write a screenplay in the Lingít — Tlingit — language. The project explores the story of two brothers, whose knowledge of the land helped them make it home after escaping a Native American boarding school.