Laura Resau is the award-winning author of nine highly acclaimed young adult and children’s novels with Scholastic and Delacorte Press, including Star in the Forest (film-optioned) and The Queen of Water (co-authored with María Virginia Farinango). Her picture book, Stand as Tall as the Trees: How an Amazonian Community Protected the Rain Forest (co-authoredwith Patricia Gualinga), was released in July of 2023, and will be followed by her sci-fi young adult novel, Virch, in thespring of 2024.
Laura draws inspiration from her time abroad as a cultural anthropologist and ESL teacher. She has collaborated with women from Ecuador and Mexico to celebrate their stories and voices. Loved by kids and adults, her novels have garnered many starred reviews and honors, including the IRA YA Fiction Award, the Américas Award, five Colorado Book Awards, spots on “best-of” booklists from Oprah, School Library Journal, the American Library Association, Bank Street, and more.
Laura is a graduate thesis mentor in the MFA programs in Nature Writing and Genre Fiction at Western Colorado University. She lives with her family in Fort Collins, Colorado and donates a portion of her royalties to Indigenous rights organizations in Latin America.