Laura Ellen Scott's mother claims that she saw her daughter struggling to copy letters and words from a dictionary before she could even read. When asked what she was doing, Laura explained, "I'm writing a book," marking the first and last time she would be eligible for The New Yorker's Writers Under 40 list. Raised in the tiny Northern Ohio township of Brimfield, she was suspended twice for ditching high school so she could hang out at nearby Kent State University's twelve-story library, but despite her poor performance as a student, Laura was allowed to graduate in her junior year to start at KSU where she excelled at writing and playing cards. It took her more than five years to complete her BA, so only by marrying very well did she manage to weasel her way into graduate school in Louisiana and later Northern Virginia, and immediately upon graduation she was offered her first and only full time job. She is now a Term Full Professor in the English Department of George Mason University, where she has taught creative writing since 1993. For decades Laura wrote short stories that were published in places like Ploughshares, Pank, Mississippi Review, and Wigleaf, but it wasn't until she received an out-of-the-blue email from the great Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina) that she started writing novels. That email said, among other things: "Damn you are good. You are just seriously satisfyingly good." Eventually Allison would blurb Laura's first novel, Death Wishing, a comic fantasy set in post-Katrina New Orleans, launching her debut at a time when other writers would be considered "mid-career." For Laura, writing novels offers her the chance to revisit the places that have affected her most deeply. For example, Death Wishing is about her favorite city. Her second novel, The Juliet, is a western about the search for a cursed emerald in Death Valley during the great wildflower bloom of 2005, and it seems especially fortuitous that the book's publication occurs during the midst of another great bloom. The New Royal Mysteries series is set in a fictional college/prison town in Ohio, a sort of fusion between her hometown of Brimfield and Athens, Ohio, where she and her husband spent the early years of their marriage while he attended graduate school. The first New Royal Mystery is The Mean Bone in Her Body, and it is slated for release in late 2016.