She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel The Snow Child.
[3] She attended Palmer High School and studied at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
[1] Ivey was a newspaper reporter at the Frontiersman in Wasilla for a decade before quitting her job to work as bookseller at Fireside Books in Palmer[4] in order to focus on writing novels.
The book is centered around a couple called Jack and Mabel who begin seeing a girl running through the Alaskan wilderness after they sculpt a child out of snow.
[5] Although a fictional account, Ivey drew inspiration from the official reports of Henry Tureman Allen's 1885 exploration of Alaska and the diaries of his expedition members.