Laura was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Southern California beach cities of Manhattan, Hermosa, and Redondo. She credits the Pacific Ocean with being her “happy place.”

In 1994, she took a break from full-time employment to pursue a college degree, graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998 when she was 51 years old. In 2013, she retired from a 45-year career in corporate administrative support positions and began research on her book about the life stories of the delegates to California’s first Constitutional Convention, published in 2019.

Baptized Catholic as an infant, Laura practiced the faith through her teen years before making the conscious decision to follow a more spiritual path. After moving to San Luis Obispo in 2015, she first joined the Unity Church, then the White Heron Sangha. She feels truly blessed to have discovered the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. After attending her first UU service on zoom in April 2021, Laura believes she has found her ideal spiritual community.