Sudoku US

I'm pretty much of a puzzle lightweight. I can rarely fight my way out of paper crossword puzzle, and I have never even attempted a Sudoku... However, that does not stop me from admiring this Sudoku map puzzle on the The Art of Puzzles blog:

[I]t is a great example of how a theme can be used in a puzzle to generate a piece of "art". As a geometric/jigsaw variant, the "3x3 boxes" are now different shapes except for Wyoming which was always pretty box-like. New York has a special Long Island cell that is separate from the rest of the state which explains its special shading - that and its my home state. The puzzle also uses letters instead of numbers, which might make it harder for some, but it is still fundamentally a sudoku puzzle.

To be quite frank, I have no idea HOW this is a puzzle... but it is true; each of the nine-square sections does resemble the shape of its state. If any of you know how to solve this, please feel free to describe it in the comments.

HT to Hunter

UPDATE: And Hunter to the rescue:

How to solve it: fill in each the grid with the letters AFKLNTVWY so that each of the nine letters appears exactly once in each row, each column, and each "state".

Let me know when you have it solved...