Laura Davis Hays was born in Whittier, California, the only child of a theoretical physicist and librarian. When she was five, the family moved to Livermore, where her father, Don, worked at the Lawrence Radiation Lab. When a young chicken wandered into the backyard from the adjacent farm, he became the first of a series of bantam rooster pets. The backyard was a garden paradise for chickens and young girls and a mother with a green thumb. At night, Laura’s father read her adventure and fantasy stories, and taught her math. Laura began studying classical piano when she was nine, and so began her lifelong love of music.

When Laura was thirteen, her father, contracted a strange illness that was eventually diagnosed as lung cancer contracted in his early work with radiation. After he died at age forty, Laura’s mother, Elaine, sold the house, put the piano in storage, and they moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where Elaine’s sisters still lived on the family farm established by their Finnish immigrant parents. Marquette Michigan was a different world from California. Laura’s new friends’ parents were miners instead of scientists. On frigid winter nights, Laura followed her friends around town, suffering frostbite on the tips of her ears. In the brief summer, the kids would wade into Lake Superior and swim in water so cold it knocked their breath away.

Elaine and Laura next moved to San Antonio Texas where Laura’s paternal grandparents lived. Harold T. Davis, was a mathematician of some renown, and Grandmother, Agnes, was lovely, sweet tempered, and of the Danish ancestry Laura would later write about. Again, Laura experienced culture shock in a state that loved football, big cars and big hair. At Rice University, Laura fit in more comfortably, and graduated with a double major in mathematics and psychology. There she met her future husband, Jim.

Although Jim was a native, leaving Texas was easy. Both wanted to move west, and in the 70’s, passing over careers in big oil made sense. They moved to Santa Fe, and after a six-month tour of Central America in a TR-4, returned and were married in a mountain meadow. Their son, Gabe, was born in 1977.

Laura began writing fiction in 1985. Besides Incarnation, she has several fantasy books in progress as well as the collection titled The Lighthouse, inspired by a family memoir about her Danish ancestors. Great Grandmother Karkondina Holm and her sisters used to skate across the frozen sea to Copenhagen by starlight.

Laura still lives in an adobe house that Jim built for them. A recent widow, Laura is exploring her new life, one she reimagines day by day. She holds a contractor’s license, works as a bookkeeper/accountant for serval clients, has a vibrant social life and still plays the piano, sometimes at her beloved spiritual center. Laura skis in the winter and enjoys watching the spectacular sunsets every night with a glass if good wine, while tinkering on her latest story.  She often travels to LA to visit Gabe, his wife, Holly, and two beloved granddaughters, Sadie and Gemma. She loves going to Hawaii and renewing her love of ocean and scuba diving, and has a trip planned to France in the spring. She hopes to continue traveling into her later years. She will always write.