Poet and marine biologist Eva Saulitis earned both an MS and MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Saulitis and her partner, Craig Matkin, studied orcas in Prince William Sound for over 30 years, an experience that informed her memoir Into Great Silence: Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas (2013). With Matkin, she founded the North Gulf Oceanic Society, a nonprofit research, conservation, and educational organization. 

Saulitis is the author of the essay collection Leaving Resurrection (2008) and the poetry collections Many Ways to Say It (2012) and Prayer in Wind (2015), a volume written in the wake of Saulitis’s cancer diagnosis that examines the spiritual impulse to pray. She received fellowships from the Island Institute, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and the Rasmuson Foundation. She taught creative writing at Kenai Peninsula College and in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  

In 2014 Saulitis was recognized with a 2014 Alaska Governor’s Award in the Humanities for her exceptional and lasting contributions to the arts and letters. She lived in Homer, Alaska.