Meet the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence: Laura Shovan

Laura Shovan

Laura Shovan is poetry editor for Little Patuxent Review. After graduating from NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program and receiving a Master of Arts in Teaching from Montclair State University, she taught high school, worked for the Dodge Poetry Festival and as a freelance journalist, and now coaches with teens with learning differences.

Laura’s chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone (CityLit Press 2010), won the inaugural Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Maryland Writers’ Association’s Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems (MWA Books, 2011) and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artists-in-Residence Program (CityLit Press, 2012), for which she is a longtime teacher. Laura spoke at the 2015 100 Thousand Poets for Change World Conference in Salerno, Italy. She is a Rita Dove Poetry Award finalist and winner of a Gettysburg Review Conference for Writers scholarship.

A member of the Poetry Friday blogging community, Laura has judged for several literary contests, including the Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards (CYBILS). The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, her novel-in-verse for children, debuts in April (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House).

• Click here to read a Baltimore Sun article about Laura Shovan‘s Writer-in-Residence visit to River Hill High School.