Growing up in Bismarck, Gagner dabbled in art as a child, dreaming of being a professional artist someday.
“I’ve always loved painting and drawing, ever since I was a little kid. When I was really small, as soon as I learned what an author/illustrator was, that you could write books and draw pictures for it, I was in. That was what my job was going to be,” she says.
“I moved to North Dakota in 2002 and at that time, I would say there was a sparsity of regional works, particularly for the Northern Plains and for North Dakota. There definitely were some, but there’s a lot of history here and we don’t really have an outlet for a lot of it,” says Dr. Suzzanne Kelley, editor in chief at the NDSU Press.
“God bless Alyce Travers. That’s probably what we say frequently in Bowman County. Many, many, many – hundreds – of our students have benefited,” says Bowman County High School Counselor Pam Fisher.
Born in 1913 in Minnesota, Alyce Travers graduated from a South Dakota high school. She married John Travers and the couple lived and ranched in Harding County, S.D. The couple remained childless, so after her husband died, Alyce established the John and Alyce B. Travers Scholarship, putting her mineral rights into an educational trust.
