Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

Kelly Ferguson’s work has appeared in mental_floss magazine, Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review (for which she received a Pushcart nomination), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Brevity, among other publications. She has an MFA from the University of Montana, and is currently teaching at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Kelly is Libra, Cancer rising, moon in Aquarius. She is Irish/French/ German, lapsed Roman Catholic, and right-brained. Kelly once received a minority scholarship for a machinist certification program at Durham Technical Community College. When Kelly was four, she ate a mothball and had to have her stomach pumped, or she would have died.

Praise for My Life as Laura

Hilarious, perceptive and true, a homespun story as genuine as the ones that inspired it.

—Judy Blunt, author of the national best seller Breaking Clean

In this charming, comic, capricious memoir, Ferguson rediscovers her childhood love of a yellow box set of Little House books and embarks on an oddball journey filled with wit, self-effacing humor, and joyful obsession.

—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

You won't detect any drawl in this Southerner's voice. Ferguson is witty and edgy in a way that feels entirely fresh.  This is stunningly sharp, pitch-perfect writing. 

—Neely Harris Lohmann, editor-in-chief, mental_floss Magazine

Grab your bonnet and plunk down in the sunny grass.  Ferguson captures the high spirits and struggles of life on the prairie, then and now.  A tribute to Wilder, a search for a truer self, a twenty-first-century pioneer journey, My Life as Laura shows us how the books we love lead us to the life we need.

—Eric LeMay, author of Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese