When Laura’s family moved to a working-class neighborhood in Southeast Michigan from New Hampshire, she was still too young to be aware of her parents’ uneasy start to small town life in a flyover state. Her father had landed a job with Ford Motor Company during the late Sixties’ auto boom. Her mother juggled caring for young children with evening classes at Eastern Michigan University. Her mother’s time at the school happened to coincide with the so-called “Michigan Murders” serial killings. It was later revealed that, while stalking women on campus, the killer had roomed with one of his relatives in their own neighborhood, just a couple of streets away. Her parents’ first months in their new state made them aware of how easily even the most careful life in the safest places can graze danger.
Her father’s career change as a purchaser for Consolidated Paper Company took the family to the weekly glass-bottle milk deliveries, gentle hills, and sulphur-laced air of a Wisconsin paper mill town. Her parents, both avid readers, filled their shelves with Book-of-the-Month and Great Books club selections, plus a few of those edgy Seventies’ classics no kid should read—unless that kid wants to be a writer someday. Around the time Laura had finally grown used to the mill’s pervasive odor, her father re-upped with Ford. The family moved back to Michigan, this time to a small town outside of Ann Arbor.
Once Laura began writing stories seriously in college, she was drawn to characters uneasy in their skins and on edge about the perils in communities outsiders think of as placid and perfectly safe. The memory of the sulphur in the Wisconsin air inspired her characters’ drive to rediscover what they have learned to overlook or ignore in their everyday lives, and in themselves.
After earning a BA from the Residential College at the University of Michigan, where she won two Hopwood Awards for her short fiction, Laura studied Russian Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As part of her Master’s program, she studied in Moscow during the tumultuous unraveling of the communist system. Back home, her first short story publication, in Orchid: A Literary Review, detailed the struggles of ordinary Muscovites facing the collapse of their way of life. The displacement and loss of identity characters experience during times of economic and political change would inspire her later stories set in the Midwest, work that would become her first short story collection.
After holding jobs that lead to great stories—bakery counter seller, diner waitress, wire harness tester for an auto supplier, elder carer, small business manager—Laura began teaching fiction and creative nonfiction at her alma mater, the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she is now a Teaching Professor. Along the way she earned an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Witness, Epiphany, Summerset Review, failbetter, The /tƐmz/ Review, The Cimarron Review, and others. Her first book, States of Motion, was a finalist for a Foreword Reviews Indie Award. The collection was also named a Notable Debut by Poets & Writers. Laura lives in Ann Arbor and, when not teaching or writing, can be found casting on or seaming her latest adventure in textiles, heading Up North, or posting the usual middle-of-the-pack time for her age group in a local 10k. Visit Laura at: https://laurahulthenthomas.com/
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Laura Hulthen Thomas’s novel, The Meaning of Fear, in the spring of 2026.
