Books By Bonnye

After decades of working in academia as a public-school teacher, homeschool teacher, and in business and federal government sectors, Alaskan author, Bonnye Matthews, experienced a life-changing event in 1988. She was poisoned. No longer able to work; instead, she was expected to die, a prognosis she strongly rejected. Knowing she had work to do in the future, Matthews decided to write with an aim to prevent or reduce for others the hazards that changed her life.

She’d never written a book. She wrote Chemical Sensitivity (1992) and edited Defining Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (1998). The first book brought communications from nine readers with the message that the book stopped their planned suicide.

Early after the millennium change, she moved to Alaska to retire in the clean air of a beautiful place she’d come to love. Further writing never crossed her mind. She took a class at Mat-Su College on Alaska History. She became fascinated with the first Americans. She researched deeply enough to realize that (1) the 11,700-year-old Clovis barrier, which archaeologists insisted designated the arrival of the earliest Americans, was not close to accurate (2) nor was the ice-free barrier transit possible. She recoiled that people were teaching fiction as fact. That spurred her to continue research for five years and emboldened her to write fiction demonstrating the facts she found. She’d never written fiction, and she wasn’t an archaeologist.

Matthews continued to research while she wrote the Winds of Change five-volume novel series: Ki’ti’s Story, 75,000 BC; Manak-na’s Story, 75,000 BC; Zamimolo’s Story, 50,000 BC; Tuksook’s Story, 35,000 BC; and The SealEaters, 20,000 BC. She followed this with a three-volume novella series with a focus on specific archaeological sites: Freedom, 250,000 BC: Out from the Shadow of Popocatepetl; Courage, 48,000 BC, The Boqueirao Refuge at Pedra Furada; and Integrity, 130,000 BC, The Cerutti Mastodon Site. Her novel series contain bibliographies. Matthews followed the fiction with a tiny non-fiction booklet with a long name: People in the Americas before the Last Ice Age Glaciation Concluded: An Emerging Western Hemisphere Population Origin Paradigm in which she summarizes her paradigm on the peopling of the Americas. Her prehistoric novels and novellas were published between 2012 and 2018. Each was an award winner at state or national levels. Her passion for her subject is evident in her writing books, creating DVDs and coloring books, and participating in speaking events.

In 2018, Matthews wanted something a bit different to write—something seriously challenging—as if that were a vacation for an admitted workaholic. It was. Arctic Dinosaurs of Alaska was born.

Through her prehistoric fiction, you can share the spark of joy that lives within her. Share Arctic Dinosaurs of Alaska with dinosaur lovers and let the reader enjoy going beyond beyond in a middle-grade fiction book chock full of multidisciplinary learning opportunities.

Matthews’ life has been one where happiness and joy abounded. It’s real—though some wonder how. From early childhood, she learned what Solomon wrote about in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: work is the source of joy. Whether she works to learn something or communicate with others, her motto has always been two words her great-aunt wrote on her soul at the end of the Second World War: beyond beyond. Aside from playing with words, beyond beyond means to her to work beyond what others would consider beyond the standard. If giving 80% were the basic standard, giving 100% might mean going beyond. Matthews would give 120%, because she’d made that level of work habitual. She received recognition because of her products, but that was minor to her in comparison to the joy she had just working. Whether in research or putting together her findings for others in teaching, business, government, or authoring, her joy is doing the work itself. It’s like an internal glow, she explains.