Laurie Ward is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction whose work is rooted in place, memory, and the quiet tensions that shape ordinary lives. She recently earned an MFA in creative writing at Hood College, where she is also vice president for marketing and communications. Her fiction has appeared in the WWPH Anthology: America’s Future and Half and One, and her creative nonfiction has been published in Big Brick Review.

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Alongside her writing life, Laurie has more than two decades shaping stories at the institutional level, leading branding, communications, and storytelling efforts in higher education and the nonprofit sector. She has overseen major rebranding initiatives, milestone celebrations, and moments of institutional change—experience that continues to inform her understanding of narrative, voice, and audience. While her professional work is collaborative and strategic, her creative work returns again and again to the personal: how people belong (or don’t), how places hold memory, and how the past quietly presses on the present.

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A native of Syracuse, New York, Laurie now lives in Frederick, Maryland, with her rescue dog, Tino. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Communications from St. John Fisher College (now University). When she’s not writing, she’s reading drafts, watching baseball, quilting stories together from small details, and paying close attention to the worlds—real and imagined—that people build and leave behind.