Laura has lived in many states
including Florida and Virginia, and recently moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to
Scottsdale, Arizona, but the place closest to her heart, where she was born and
raised, is Fairbanks, Alaska. She doesn’t miss the winters, but she definitely
misses the summers and that small town, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere feeling.
Alaska is still a big part of her and pretty much everything she writes takes
place there.
Something people often don’t know when they first meet Laura is that she has an eye disease called macular degeneration — diagnosed when she was fourteen — and as a result, is legally blind. That means basically that she can’t drive, can’t read regular print, and tends to avoid crowds because she can’t see faces real well. For a long time, Laura struggled with the fact that she wasn’t ‘normal’–that is until she realized, no one’s normal!
She used this experience to write her debut novel BLIND SPOT.
Laura earned a MA in Children’s Literature from Eastern Michigan University and is a former Language Arts teacher and special education aide for middle and high school students. She writes full-time now, but runs a monthly Creative Writing Club for fifth through eighth graders at her children’s school and never passes up an opportunity to talk about or help children with writing.
Photo by Vania Stoyanova, VLC Productions