ABOUT

Some of her earliest memories surround the magic of stories. Stories took Laura to places she had never been, allowed her to imagine the lives of others, and inspired her to dream. By the time she had reached her teens, she cherished two dreams—to be a novelist and to find her own happily-ever-after.

Laura can still remember, all these long years later, the pure joy of the moment she knew that she wanted to be an author. In the class of her favorite high school English teacher, reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” sparked a life-changing revelation. "He created a whole world with words," Laura says. She remembers being mesmerized and thinking, "I want to do that." She wrote her first short story the summer before her senior year. It was rejected, but that didn’t erase her need to create her own story worlds.

Laura attended Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, with the intention of being a psychology major, but by the end of her freshman year, psychology had disenchanted her and left her feeling that she was on the wrong path. She switched her major to English and added a minor in Philosophy, but she didn’t take her first creative writing class until after she'd earned her bachelor’s degree. She'd written just two short stories when her creative writing professor said, “You’re never going to find your own voice until you stop trying to write like Hemingway and Faulkner.” Laura believed him.