Klancy Clark de Nevers grew up in Aberdeen, Washington where her family ran a print shop and published the weekly Grays Harbor Post. She attended Stanford University and then accompanied her husband Noel de Nevers of San Francisco to Michigan, California and finally Salt Lake City, Utah, where they have lived for more than 40 years.

In 1970 she earned a Master’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of Utah. After a varied career in technical and managerial positions that allowed her to use her mathematical and computing skills, she retired to focus on writing. With Lucy Hart of Seattle, she edited Cohassett Beach Chronicles: World War II in the Pacific Northwest by Kathy Hogan, a book of Hogan’s columns from the wartime pages of the Grays Harbor Post.

Her poem "Curator" won first place in the City Weekly literary competition in September 2000. She serves as treasurer for City Art, a grass roots literary organization that presents readings each week in the Salt Lake City Public Library, and also for Writers@Work, which presents a nationally known writing conference in Salt Lake City. She serves on the Literary Arts Advisory Panel of the Utah Arts Council.

Her latest book is The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II ( University of Utah Press, 2004). This book provides the first in-depth account of Aberdeen’s Karl Bendetsen who single-mindedly, it seemed to the Japanese Americans, pushed for their exclusion and then headed the Army’s evacuation of all Americans of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast in 1942. Because Bendetsen’s hometown is also hers, she starts the story in Aberdeen, and contrasts it with the very different experience of Perry Saito, his neighbor and one of his innocent captives. The book probes a past that Bendetsen apparently wanted to revise and consistently denied.

Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati said of The Colonel and the Pacifict: “The result [of de Nevers’ research] is a gripping and sometimes surprising story that links Saito and Bendetsen in what was a national tragedy. Much of the book’s power comes from the fact that it focuses on a few American lives. It is particularly appropriate to reconsider this aspect of the Japanese American experience at a time when another group of American ethnics, the Muslim community with foreign roots, is under suspicion of disloyalty.”

For more information visit www.klancydenevers.com.

Click the following link for a study guide to The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Klancy de Nevers will appear on Saturday, Oct. 28, 5 pm, in the Salt Lake City Main Library, Conference Room C. Klancy will also participate in the “A Collage of Human Rights Experiences: A Panel Discussion” on Saturday, Oct. 28, 12:30 pm, in the Salt Lake City Main Library, Conference Room A/B.