Laura Wetherington

Originally from Virginia, Laura Wetherington first moved to Nevada in 1987 at the age of 10. As a student at Incline Middle School, she fell in love with poetry after a visiting writer taught a lesson on meter. She has spent much of her life returning to Nevada, most recently moving back to Reno after a six-year stint in the Netherlands. Much of her writing and thinking tries to reckon with the line between belonging and not belonging—to a place, to a culture, to a language tradition.

Her poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared widely, including Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Narrative, The Volta, Hyperallergic, Full Stop, and Jacket2. She is the author of two full-length poetry books, "A Map Predetermined and Chance" (Fence Books) and "Parallel Resting Places" (Free Verse Editions). She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe’s Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program and online with the International Writers’ Collective in Amsterdam. She has been awarded artist grants in literary arts from the Nevada Arts Council and the Sierra Arts Foundation and has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Camac, Pasture Project Space, and Kimmel Harding Nelson.