LAUREL S. PETERSON M.A., Writing, Manhattanville College,

I am a Professor of English at Norwalk Community College (NCC) and an adjunct in the graduate school at Manhattanville College where I teach expository and creative writing, and interdisciplinary courses in the arts. I have also taught business writing in both corporate and academic settings.

At NCC, I co-founded the Fairfield County Women’s Center and acted as Director in its inaugural year. I then started a women’s studies program at the college, which I chaired for four years. I also co-chaired the College’s annual Academic Festival for two years, which included bringing playwright Wendy Wasserstein to campus to speak.

My writing career has included a newspaper column on local history for Gannett Suburban newspapers and serving as editor of the literary journal Inkwell. My poetry has been published in The Atlanta Review, The Baltimore Review, The Distillery, Poet Lore, SLAB, The Rio Grande Review, The Texas Review, Thin Air, Yankee, and others. In 2006, I was a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry for my poetry manuscript Mud Never Forgets. My poetry chapbook, That’s the Way the Music Sounds, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (July 2009).

I am a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). My current projects include a mystery novel and a full-length collection of my poetry. While New York City is just about my favorite place on earth, my husband, poet Van Hartmann, and I live in Connecticut and Vermont, where I garden, cook, walk in the woods and, in the winter, read by the fire.