Laura Johnsrude began writing creative nonfiction after retiring from practicing pediatrics and moving with her family to Louisville, Kentucky. Her pieces revolve around caregiving, mothering, illness, and vulnerability. Laura's essays have appeared, or are forthcoming in, River Teeth, Bellevue Literary Review, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, The Spectacle, Please See Me, Minerva Rising, Under the Gum Tree, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Drunk Monkeys, The Examined Life Journal, SWING, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Boom Project anthology, and on Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. 

Her essay, “Drawing Blood,” received Bellevue Literary Review’s Honorable Mention for the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction in the spring of 2018, and her piece, “Brown Barrette in My Hair,” was winner of Sweet’s 2022 Creative Nonfiction Flash Essay contest. Laura’s narrative medicine piece in Intima, “Beholding Something Fine,” received a 2023 Pushcart Prize nomination.

Laura earned her M. A. in Writing from Spalding University’s Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing, and she is the Assistant Book Review Editor for the program’s literary journal, Good River Review. Her book reviews have been published in Good River Review.