Laurie Hertzel
Presenter: Memoir: Finding Your Story, Telling the Truth

Laurie Hertzel is the Senior Books Editor at the STAR TRIBUNE. Previously, she was a writer and editor at Minnesota Monthly Magazine and at the Duluth News-Tribune. Her journalism has appeared in newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

She is the author of three books: News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, They Took My Father: Finnish-Americans in Stalin’s Russia, and Boomtown Landmarks. She has also contributed a chapter to the textbook Real Feature Writing and to the anthology Robert Bly in this World. Her memoir, News to Me, was a winner of a 2011 Minnesota Book Award.

Hertzel has been writer-in-residence at the James Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, a fellow at Duke University and a speaker at conferences and workshops around the country. In 2011, she was one of four American journalists invited to speak at a conference on narrative writing in Bucharest, Romania. She twice served on the faculty of the Nieman Conference on Narrative Editing at Harvard University and three times was a speaker at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Writing at Harvard.

About her topic, Laurie states “I’m most interested in figuring out what story you want to tell and then discussing the question of veracity. When, if ever, can you embellish? How do you fill in scenes if you don’t remember all the details? What do you do if your story is going to hurt someone else?”