About Me
Award-winning freelance writer and photographer Laura Read covers travel, the environment, and culture for the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, Tahoe Quarterly magazine and other publications.
Laura Read finds the good stories and gets the story right. As a news reporter, she’s won awards for spot news, leisure & lifestyle writing, and enterprise reporting. Always digging deep, she’s launched collaborative projects on teen drug use, immigration, and Lake Tahoe environmental issues. Drawn to quirky high achievers, she’s profiled an array of characters, from guitar-crafting cowboys, polo players, and rocket-car drivers to ultra-marathon runners, avalanche survivors, and organic farmers.
Born in Boston, raised in Washington State, schooled in Massachusetts, Laura Read has explored cross-cultural connections all of her life. Her bachelor’s degree from Smith College (in Art History with intensive work in American Studies) led to early stints at a New Hampshire art museum and a Seattle commercial art gallery. In the late 1980s, after canoeing the MacMillan River in the Canadian Yukon and backpacking through eastern and southern Europe, she joined the Jackson Hole News in Jackson Wyoming as first arts writer, then arts editor, then beat reporter covering the ski industry and environmental issues. Curiosity inspired a half-year solo tour of Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Southern Mexico. Later, as a weekly news reporter and editor in Lake Tahoe, Calif., she yearned to tell bigger stories through freelancing. Soon, she was on her own, freelancing for newspaper dailies such as the San Jose Mercury News, Reno Gazette-Journal, and San Francisco Chronicle, and magazines such as Sunset, Prime Fitness and Health, Tahoe Quarterly, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, National Geographic Traveler and Adventure Sports Journal.
Laura is at work on a series of essays about Nordic skiing, and is researching material for two books set in the Sierra Nevada and northeast India.
Please contact laura@readwriteshoot.com