User:Jseverso/sandbox

Carrie La Seur is an American novelist from Montana, the author of the literary thriller The Home Place (William Morrow 2014) and The Weight of an Infinite Sky (William Morrow 2018), a family drama loosely drawn from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,. She contributed stories to the 2017 anthologies Montana Noir and Sandstone. Her travel essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, interviews, and law review articles appear in publications as diverse as Iowa Farmer Today, Rumpus, Mother Jones, the Guardian, High Country News, and Harvard Law and Policy Review.

Background

La Seur was born in southern California, where her father, a Vietnam era veteran, had been stationed out of Camp Pendleton in the U.S. Marine Corps and became a first generation college graduate on the GI Bill. The family quickly moved back to Montana, where both her parents were born and have roots in frontier Montana of the 1860s and 1890s. While La Seur was growing up the family lived in Billings, Montana; Grand Island, Nebraska; and Minot, North Dakota, following her father’s jobs in the grocery and convenience store business. Her mother, also the first college graduate in her family, worked as an English teacher.

La Seur graduated from Minot High School as a National Merit finalist before going on to study English and French and earn a magna cum laude degree from Bryn Mawr College with a focus in economics. During college she studied for a year at l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques and l’Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne, interned with French Senate Vice President Pierre-Christian Taittinger, and taught English in Suzuka, Japan for a summer. She won a Rhodes Scholarship that funded studies at Oxford University in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literatures, where she earned a doctorate with a dissertation titled “Spinning in Her Grave: Simone de Beauvoir’s Influence on Feminist Theology”.

Although appointed to a lecturership at l’Université de Paris X – Nanterre, La Seur had to refuse the post due to changes in French immigration law that made it impossible to obtain a work visa before running out of money. She was briefly a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Literature at Stanford University before moving to Iowa City, Iowa, where she attended the summer session at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked various odd jobs while applying to law school.

As a student at Yale Law School she participated in National Environmental Moot Court and the Yale Environmental Law Clinic, and interned with Earthjustice. After graduating, she worked for a year as a Research Assistant for the Federal Court of Australia. While down under she completed Oxfam’s 100 kilometer Trailwalker fundraiser with a team of four, rode in the Great Tasmanian Bike Ride around the eastern coast of Tasmania, snorkled the Great Barrier Reef, and camel trekked for a week in the Lake Eyre basin of central Australia.

Upon returning to the US, La Seur held a legal fellowship with the Chicago nonprofit Environmental Law & Policy Center before founding the nonprofit Plains Justice in 2006. As Executive Director of Plains Justice, La Seur led successful campaigns to prevent construction of new coal-fired power plants and pipelines for Canadian tar sands crude oil in the Midwestern US. She was instrumental in launching the national campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. To facilitate access to isolated clients and environmental fights, in 2008 she earned her private pilot’s license.

In 2012, La Seur stepped down from leadership of Plains Justice to return to private practice focused on energy and environmental issues and to write. In 2013, she signed her first book contract and reduced her law practice hours. Her first two novels appeared in 2014 and 2018, along with a growing bibliography of shorter pieces in major publications. In 2016, La Seur left her law practice to write full-time.

Bibliography

·      The Home Place (2014, William Morrow; translated into German)

·      “Bad Blood” in Montana Noir (2017, Akashic Books)

·      “Colt the Bull-Riding Hasid” in Sandstone (2017, Billings Bookstore Cooperative)

·      The Weight of an Infinite Sky (2018, William Morrow)

Other information

La Seur has a blue belt in taekwondo and has competed extensively as a rower and triathlete. She speaks French and some Spanish and has studied Arabic, German, Japanese, Latin, and Russian. Only one of her grandparents graduated from (or attended) high school. She is a co-founder of Billings Bookstore Cooperative, a community-owned independent bookstore operating since 2016 as This House of Books in Billings, Montana.

References

External links

·      Carrie La Seur’s webpage http://carrielaseur.com/

·      Carrie La Seur at HarperCollins (publisher) http://www.harpercollins.com/author/cr-108281/carrie-la-seur/