The Wyoming Authors Wiki

Laura Bell

Bell, Laura

Cody, WY

Biographical and Professional Information

Laura Bell’s work has been published in several collections, and from the Wyoming Arts Council she has received two literature fellowships as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. She lives in Cody, and since 2000 has worked for The Nature Conservancy there.

Genres

Essay

Nonfiction

Wyoming Subjects

Titles

Claiming Ground (March 2010). New York: Knopf. ISBN: 9780307272881

Advance praise for Claiming Ground:

First, it is the language you notice: phrases, whole passages composed with the musical authority of psalms. And then there is the evocation of place, Wyoming rising from these pages as actual as a wild perfume. But it is the honesty that keeps you up in the night, wondering at the frailty of what it means to be human and glad and brave and, at times, broken. Laura Bell’s CLAIMING GROUND is the finest memoir I’ve read.

Mark Spragg, author of Where Rivers Change Direction and An Unfinished Life

This is a book that compels you to the last sentence, both because of its sheer beauty and its profound meaning. It goes deep and way out to the edges, in beautifully composed, exact prose. It makes you think of Thoreau out in the woods, confronting the essential. This is just a fresh, wonderful piece of writing, about the isolated and attentive kind of life almost nobody lives nowadays, or ever did.

Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide

Intriguing and eloquent, by turns guarded then vulnerable, and always written with honesty and keen observation, Laura Bell’s CLAIMING GROUND merges exquisitely the human condition of wonder, celebration, fear and longing with the western landscape that so arouses and nurtures these same senses.

Rick Bass, author of Why I Came West