Laura Esther Wolfson is the author of For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, winner of the 2017 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in June 2018. The book has been described as a memoir, a booklength essay, a story collection, and an essay collection. Her work has won the Notting Hill Essay Prize, been repeatedly cited in The Best American Essays and published in Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus, The Sun, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. It blends travel writing, literary criticism, confessional, prose poetry, and historical elements, making liberal use of wordplay, double entendre, chiasmus, synecdoche, metonymy, and other literary devices, as well as hidden and half quotations. She is a professional translator of Russian and French to English.
In residence, she expanded the first section of her projected second book of literary nonfiction/autofiction, tentatively entitled Super-Pricey Royal Blue French Lace Bra. It focuses on themes of love, illness, sex, love of literature, and hypocrisy at the United Nations.
Portrait by Florence Montmare
