Wendy Newell Dyer

Wendy Newell Dyer is a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Nation. Given up at birth and later adopted, she searched for and found her biological parents when she was twenty-five and began her journey to come to know herself as a Passamaquoddy woman. In the past thirty-four years she has fully immersed herself in cultural teachings, practices and ceremonies. She graduated from the University of Maine at Machias in 2003. She was a freelance writer/photographer for the Downeast Coastal Press and the Machias Valley News Observer where she covered a variety of topics including the Maine High School Basketball Tournaments. Widowed at forty-two, Wendy helped write educational materials for the Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer, and won a national writing contest sponsored by the Prostate Cancer Foundation and judged by actress Kristin Bell. Her story "A Warrior's Homecoming" appeared in Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writers from New England in 2014. Several of her stories have been published in the online literary magazine Dawnland Voices 2.0, two Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and Homeschooling Today magazine, soon to be joined by a feature in The Maine Standard. As an adoptee, Wendy testified before the Maine Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. She recently shared her adoption story on WERU's Dawnland Signals. Newell Dyer was one of the recent winners of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Call for Native Writers and was awarded a 2022 MWPA Ashley Bryan Fellowship. She works for Wayfinder Schools as the Passages teacher for Washington County and serves on the board at Cobscook Institute. She has three sons, four grandsons and a black lab Jack.