Your Custom Text Here
About
After starting her writing career as an American Society of Magazine intern at Time magazine, Laura Durnell's fiction and non-fiction has appeared nationally and locally. Whether the genre she writes in short fiction, opinion journalism, feature articles, or essays, Laura's works explores and comments on women's issues, health and disability, and the arts.
Her short fiction has appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Room, The Antigonish Review, JEF (Journal of Experimental Fiction), and ACM (Another Chicago Magazine). Her short story "Regina Leigh" that appeared in Room won third prize in the 1998 Playboy College Fiction Context. In 2004, her short story "Judgment" won the Mary Roberts Rinehard Award for National Fiction from George Mason University and the Rinehart Fund and was later published in Fifth Wednesday Journal where it was nominated for for an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award.
After attending The OpEd Project's Core and Advanced seminar, Laura's commentaries were then pulished by The Huffington Post, Women's Media Center, and Garnet News.
Her feature articles; book, music, and art reviews; and essays have appeared in Time, Book, Chicago Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine); The Times of Northwest Indiana, New City, Chicago's Subnation, Lake Shore Drive, and The Creative Woman. Her feature article "This Time of Truth and Talent that appeared in The Creative Woman won First Place in the Issues Relevant to Women category of Chicago Women in Publishing's annual awards.
Her residencies include Ragdale and The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow.
Laura holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing (fiction concentration) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor's of Arts in Journalism from Eastern Illinois University.
Currently, she teaches first year writing and first year liberal arts seminars of female life narrative artists, tutors writing at Wilbur Wright College, and is working on her first novel and short story collection.