Laura Pritchett is the author/editor of six books. Her fiction includes the novel Sky Bridge, which won the WILLA Fiction Award; and the short story collection Hell's Bottom, Colorado, which won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the PEN USA Award. She is also the editor/co-editor of three anthologies: Pulse of the River, Home Land, and Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers. Her newest book, Great Colorado Bear Stories, has just been released.

Laura has also published over 80 essays and short stories in numerous magazines, including The Sun, Orion, High Country News, High Desert Journal, OnEarth, Natural Resources Journal, 5280 (Denver's Magazine), The Pinch, and others; and her work has been anthologized in the books Comeback Wolves, A Dozen on Denver, Telling it Real, How the West Was Warmed, The Mysterious Life of the Heart,Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming, West of 98, and others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on several occasions.

She serves as contributing editor to 5280: Denver's Magazine and The Normal School Journal.

Laura is a faculty member at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, teaches around the country, and works as a writing coach. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Purdue University. She lives in northern Colorado.

You can reach Laura at L_Pritchett@msn.com.

To read one of Laura's
short stories
(and author interview)
click here

For some nonfiction, try one of these:
www.hcn.org
www.5280.com

To hear a recent radio interview on Colorado Public Radio:
click here

Schedule of Events click here

Great Colorado Bear Stories is an incredible look at Colorado’s bears, including the grizzlies that once roamed across the state, and the black bears that still do.

Carefully researched and skillfully written, these stories involve death and near-death, playfulness and humor. Some stories are historical – Roosevelt’s hunting, Pike’s exploring, and the death of Colorado’s last grizzly. Other tales are contemporary – the death of a logger, two campers who nearly lost their lives, the scientists who crawl into bear dens. These stories involve hikers, ranchers, wildlife biologists, historians, Native Americans, and regular folks whose lives have intersected with the great bruins of our state.

Whether you are intrigued by bears or simply like amazing true stories, Great Colorado Bear Stories is a remarkable book about understanding and living with Colorado’s bears.

— “A valuable and wide-ranging work of scholarship, love, and respect, Pritchett’s
book is a great source for the history of bears in Colorado—black and grizzly.” — Rick Bass, author, Why I Came West and The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado

“In Great Colorado Bear Stories, prize-winning author Laura Pritchett has clearly done her homework, and then some. Whether your interest is the history of human interactions with grizzly and black bears in Colorado, bear attacks, the avoidance of bear attacks, basic bear biology, techniques for living peacefully with bears as neighbors, or you merely want to read some great Colorado bear yarns, this book is a reliable and highly readable resource.” — David Petersen, author, Ghost Grizzlies: Does the Great Bear Still Haunt Colorado?

Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers For Going Green, Pritchett has gathered over twenty writers to tell their personal stories of Dumpster diving, eating road kill, salvaging plastic from the beach, and forgoing another trip to the mall for the thrill of bargain hunting at yard sales and flea markets. They look not just at the many ways people glean but also at the larger, thornier issues dealing with what re-using—or not—says about our culture and priorities.
TO READ MORE CLICK HERE

Sky Bridge
"From beginning to end, Sky Bridge grabs you by the heart and never lets you go."
— The Denver Post

Hell's Bottom, Colorado
"Displays the talent of a brilliant, new writer."
— The Rocky Mountain News
"Pritchett excels at juxtaposing the sensuous with the severe, the rapturous with the repugnant." -– Booklist

Pulse of the River
"This is a book with all the blessed diversity of the Cache la Poudre itself, moving through all the wildlands and farmlands, uplands and flatlands of nature and human nature conjoined." — George Sibley. (Royalties donated to the Colorado Water Trust)

Home Land: Ranching and a West that Works
"Trust me: This is not a collection of essays. It is a string of pearls. This book throbs with the beating heart of the West." — Ed Marston. (Royalties donated to the Colorado Cattleman's Ag Land Trust)