Laura Bandy attended University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers PhD program from 2009 to 2013, where she received the Joan Johnson Poetry Award. In 2018, she won first prize in the Trio of Triolets contest and received third place in the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition that same year. She has had work in Ninth Letter, The Cossack Review, Sin Fronteras, River Styx, and Typo among others, and currently has poems in The Laurel Review and Midwest Review. She hails from Jacksonville, Illinois, home of the Ferris wheel.