Janice Shamberg
Janice Carter Shamberg, (jcshamberg@gci.net), has lived many lives -- Air Force brat, Italian student, bookkeeper, legal assistant, mother, business owner and politician. As a child she lived in Puerto Rico, two cities in Texas, two cities in Oklahoma and Louisiana, three cities in Florida, and, lastly, in Seldovia, Kodiak and Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Florida State University in Tallahassee and the FSU Study Center in Florence, Italy during the 1967 flooding of the Arno River. She drove from Florida to Alaska in 1968 and ultimately finished her art degree at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. In Anchorage she met her husband, Brock, and together they raised three children. From 1979 until 1995, she owned and operated a successful retail garden center specializing in perennials for the severe and challenging Alaskan climate. During that time, she wrote one of the first in-house, desktop-published monthly horticultural newsletters in the US. As very little had yet been written about hardy, non-indigenous plants for Alaska, Janice also did all of the research for her articles. She came out of retirement in 2000 when she was elected to the Anchorage Assembly. She still finds time to create beautiful things in a variety of media, as well as cooking and traveling.