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Born in Louisville, Ky., and reared in Duluth, Minn., Laurie Hertzel is the author of two memoirs, News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist (2010) and Ghosts of Fourth Street (March 2026), and co-author with Mayme Sevander of a memoir, They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin's Russia (2004), all three published by the University of Minnesota Press. News to Me was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.
A lifelong journalist, Laurie spent 15 years as the books editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minn., and now reviews books for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and elsewhere, and teaches in the low-residency MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia in Athens. She has also taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and has conducted many workshops on memoir writing around Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Laurie's fiction has been published in North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review and the South Carolina Review, and her short story, Snapshots, won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize.
She served two terms on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, including stints as President and as Chair of the Autobiography Committee. She has held fellowships from Duke University and the James Thurber House and her work has been honored with awards from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the William Allen White Award, and the Society for Features Journalism. In 2023 she was honored with the Kerlan Award, given annually by the University of Minnesota to recognize contributions to children's literature.
Laurie holds an MFA in nonfiction from Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.