Rosemarie Avrana Meyok was born in a small Hudson Bay post on Reid Island, Northwest Territories, and now lives in Kugluktuk, Nunavut. She studied as a teacher in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, and worked as an Inuinnaqtun teacher and program specialist, developing Inuktut teaching resources for the Nunavut Department of Education. She went on to study linguistics at the University of Western Ontario and the University of New Mexico. She has worked as a language researcher and translator. Rosemarie has four children (two of whom were adopted to her sister through custom adoption), twenty grandchildren, and more than ten great-grandchildren. Rosemarie loves to sew, bead, and design traditional and contemporary clothing. She spends as much time as she can out on the land with her large family.