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ALL VOICES OPEN MIC
Laura Mahal
Laura Mahal is part of Lighthouse Writers Book Project, a two-year fellowship, where she is noveling and gaining a firm grasp on craft. She has work in sixteen anthologies and lit mags (and counting): Sunrise Summits, Flash! A Celebration of Short Fiction (2017); DoveTales: Empathy in Art, Fish [Ireland] (2018); Still Coming Home, The Daily Abuse, Veterans Voices (2019); Across the Margin, Charlie Mike, DoveTales: Resistance, Encore, The Blue Mountain Review (2020); The Avalon Review, Fresh Starts, Chiaroscuro, and The Road She's Traveled (2021). Her nonfiction piece, “How to Escape from a Cult,” won Women on Writing’s fall 2020 national essay contest. Laura's a two-time winner of the Hecla Award for Speculative Fiction and won the Gladys Feld Helzberg Memorial Award for Best Poem in the spring of 2019. You’ll find some of her work at www.lauramahalwriter.com.
By day, she's a copy editor and has a list of beloved and award-winning clients. Laura was on the editing team for Rise, which won the 2020 Colorado Book Award in the anthology category, and she copyedited Charlie Mike in collaboration with Colorado State University’s veterans’ center. Her dual passions are the LGBTQ+ and veterans’ communities—she frequently writes for both. Beyond that, Laura loves “matchmaking” poets and writers to publications that are perfect for their work. She firmly believes there is room for all of us, when we support one another.