Laura Zak

I’m from Lubbock, Texas, a panhandle town with flat horizons and fierce wind that kicks dirt into the sky. I wrote my first story here, set in it a different time and place (eighth grade, writing about elves and magic), but the red rock mesas and cotton fields couldn’t stay out of my writing.

So I went to Texas Tech University, took a degree in English studying environmental and social justice literature. As I read books about power structures and racism, I road my bike to the East side of town, taught at an afterschool center and saw the rundown houses and the way highways can segregate a city. So I wrote until a few stories came out good. I published them in an undergraduate journal, won an award from the Texas Association of Creative Writing, staged some readings, collaborated with friends. I graduated in 2010. I kept writing. A few good, some more bad.

I took a job working with an oral history project, collecting and transcribing interviews about wind energy development in Texas. I learned wind energy isn’t a saving grace, and with everything, there’s all this gray space. So when people ask what I write about, I say all those gray spaces in life. I say I write about my family, Texas, the wind, the racism. What it means to look at a city with eyes wide open and see both the ramshackle houses and blue blazing sky. The things that make Lubbock terrible and great.