User:Laura Roberts

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[edit] Laura Roberts

Laura Roberts (born October 14, 1978 in New Jersey) is an American author currently living in Montreal. Her writing features an element of "indie smut" and a polished surface which has won her extremely polarized reviews from her creative writing professors. Roberts' writing has been described as "raw and raunchy, a delight to all the senses" (Broken Pencil). She has called herself a Smut Mistress, while she has been pegged as a Daughter of the Devil. Her characters are young, generally sexually attractive people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it. Roberts prefers to set her stories in Montreal, utilizing an outsider's perspective of the city to reclaim its romanticism. Her writings are also linked by commonly-named characters, references to pop culture phenomena, and sexually liberated female protagonists.


[edit] Biography

She was born in New Jersey and raised in Illinois, the daughter of a mechanical engineer and a homemaker. Her parents have always been stable people and, in stark contrast to many modern couples, never contemplated divorce. She was educated at York Community High School, where she distinguished herself as a member of the concert band, bowling and badminton teams, and then took a Philosophy degree at Fordham University in The Bronx. She was a full- or part-time employee at a variety of odd jobs, before moving to Montreal to attend Concordia University in 2002. Her first zine was published while she was still a student in the Creative Writing program. Black Heart, a zine about love, lust, sex and relationships gone bad, was well received by the critics and sold respectably (200 copies of the first issue). She released the second issue in October 2005, the third issue in June 2006, the fourth in April 2007 and the fifth in August 2007.

Her most controversial work, the stimulatingly sexual second issue, was intended to be published by Concordia Printing Services, but after shopping around for cheaper prices, it was decided that Dossier (a new branch of Bureau En Gros) would print the issue, despite protests from Managing Editor, Kathleen Savoy, and pressure from fans to retain the red cardstock cover from the first issue.


[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Trivia

  • Roberts has almost been killed off the coast of Hawaii, fired from two jobs in Canada and propositioned by a foot fetishist in Times Square. She was once stalked by a man imprisoned for attempted rape and armed robbery. She enjoys the musical stylings of both Mozart and Madonna and has run on a treadmill alongside Johnny Depp at the Westmount YMCA. There is only one lie contained in the preceeding paragraph.
  • Black Heart - the title of the zine is taken from a David Usher song, "Black Black Heart." When Usher's management refused to grant Roberts permission to use the title in homage, she simply removed one of the "black"s.
  • There are frequent allusions throughout Roberts' work, including references to films, music, modern fiction, Greek mythology, etc. Many of her stories are homages, such as "Kat Likes Pretty Boys," a reference to 10 Things I Hate About You, which is in itself an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.