Laura Maylene Walter is a writer and editor in Cleveland and the author of the debut novel Body of Stars (Dutton 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Ohioana Book Awards and the UK Booksellers Association’s March 2021 Fiction Book of the Month. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review, the Horse Girls (Harper Perennial 2021) anthology, Literary Hub, The Sun, The Masters Review, Slate, F(r)iction, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southeast Review, Chicago Tribune‘s Printers Row, and many other publications.

Laura was a 2023 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has also been a Yaddo Fellow, a Tin House Writers’ Workshop Fiction Scholar, and a writer-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institution, Art Omi: Writers, and the former Writers in the Heartland. She is the recipient of a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a 2022 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin grant, and the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Her debut short story collection, Living Arrangements (BkMk Press 2011), won a national gold IPPY award and a silver Foreword Book of the Year award.

Laura grew up in Lancaster, PA. She studied literature and creative writing at Washington College, where she received the Sophie Kerr Prize, the nation’s largest undergraduate literary award. She worked in several nonprofit positions and as the senior editor of a trade magazine prior to pursuing her MFA in fiction at Bowling Green State University, where she taught creative writing and composition, served as the fiction editor of Mid-American Review, and coordinated Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing. From 2016 to 2021, she served as a regular blogger for Kenyon Review. In 2017, she helped found Literary Cleveland’s Gordon Square Review, where she served as Editor in Chief until 2022; during her tenure, pieces appearing in Gordon Square Review received a Pushcart Prize and publication in Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. 

Currently, Laura is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library and the host of the Page Count podcast. She leads writing workshops for Literary Cleveland, was the 2022-2023 Fiction Mentor in the Breakthrough Writing Residency, serves as a contributing editor of Cherry Tree, and is a freelance writer and editor. She has taught as guest faculty in the NEOMFA program at both Kent State University and Cleveland State University as well as in the Pocket MFA.

Short Bio:
Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the novel Body of Stars. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, the Horse Girls anthology, and many other publications. She has received grants, awards, or fellowships from Yaddo, Sewanee, Ohio Arts Council, Tin House, Ohioana Library Association, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Chautauqua Institution, and Art Omi. Laura is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library, where she hosts Page Count, a literary podcast.