About Lauren

Winner, Second Place, 2025 First Chapters Contest.

“A young woman arrives at a convent with crippling debt, grief, and some serious doubts about faith and friendship. I was drawn in by the story’s play with form, but stayed connected throughout the excerpt because of the narrator’s wry humor, her wit, and, despite herself, her deep vulnerability, which pushes her to consider the challenges of community, faith, and economic precarity. It’s rare to read a story which so expertly handles the pitfalls and redemptions of catholic community for a twenty-first century person. I loved this excerpt. —Alejandro Heredia, guest judge”

Winner of the 2025 Short Fiction Award

Selected for 2026 Best of the Net Anthology

*Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature.

“When Lian traded the dharma for a baby, I’d just hung up my heart for good. 

It wasn’t anything special. I returned home from work one Thursday evening, and Lian sang out from the kitchen: I have some news. I found her seated at the black card table that doubled as her writing desk, legs crossed in light blue jeans, the linen robe she wore daily now draped over the pantry door. I called another nun this afternoon, Lian told me. A nun from her former monastery, the one nestled in the mountains circling Hangzhou. After a few incantations delivered over speakerphone, Lian was free.”

Summer 2024, “Futurism as Resistance” Issue.

*Nominated for Best of the Net.

“Being exposed is a lonely existence. You know the deposition, the filings, the court-room sketches. It’s all public record now. For your consideration: the half-winged pterodactyl, a one-time predator now tethered and tamed. It’s what happens when you’re pulled from the ground. They say we half-winged pterodactyls are predatory by nature.”

Spring 2024, print.

Winner of the Emerging Writer Fellowship from the 2024 Lit Fest in Denver (Lighthouse Writers Workshop).

Finalist for The Adroit Journal’s Veasna So Scholarship.

Read an excerpt.

March 2024, online.

“The woman in Van Nuys has a red bucket full of roses, enough for each visitor to this crook of the strip mall. Approximately 5,200 girls go to Van Nuys each year, give or take emergencies and second opinions and holidays; Van Nuys is not open on most holidays. There are the most girls on Thursdays and the least girls on Mondays. Sunday is Van Nuys’ day off when the girls stay home and the woman goes to church. “

Spring 2024, print.

“Outside the terminal, I shifted my mother into the only sliver of shade and lit a menthol in the 105-degree sun. It’s hot as shit. I’d packed menthols because once, I had a boyfriend in the desert who claimed, You smoke menthols in the desert. I’m not sure why, but this boyfriend and I slept in his parents’ guesthouse during the day, snorted Xanax poolside at night, and I’d believe anything anyone with Xanax told me then.”

January 2023, online. With voiceover by Alex Shafer and art by Nora Kelly. (Originally published in Hobart, 2020.)

“There’s always a man, somewhere, taking out the trash, his light blue jeans rolled above his ankles; waving at his elderly neighbor watering her tomato plants; picking up the morning paper and click-click-clicking his tongue at the new abortion law gridlocking Congress. Look at these fucking idiots, he shakes the paper at his girlfriend as she steps into her senior-management-approved pencil skirt, thank God we live in this state, which could be Oregon or New York or California but never Texas or Kentucky or Mississippi but maybe Illinois or Michigan or Colorado—somewhere Democratic and diplomatic.”

Issue 52.2, Winter 2023, print. *Shortlisted for The Masters Review 2024 Reprint Prize. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

“Lian and I cannot handle this samsara any longer. No, Lian will claim she cannot handle samsara; I want to pass through this samsara to the next. I’ve learned to live as just a speck in this universe, a speck that does not exist without its fellow specks. I am only here because once I was there and I will soon be there again.”

Fall 2022, print.

Spring 2022, online. *Finalist for Phoebe’s 2022 Short Fiction Prize.

Spring 2018, print. Archived online.

Spring 2018, online.

May 2021, online.

“The patronesses are throwing a party for Petronilla, who’s spent the last three months in rehab recovering from an eating disorder. It was a hasty starvation. Petronilla had gone and locked herself up in her father’s attic for eight days. Her father called it mania; her ex-fiancé, hysteria. The doctors agreed it was mental. A crisis without a trigger. But isn’t everything spiritual these days?”

Issue Nine, May 2022, online. Selected for Issue Ten, anniversary issue, December 2022.

“On the way back to the mainland, the tremors in his hands began acting up again, and you used your thumbs as restraints. You wanted to hold them back, those funny pulses beneath his WASP skin. Here’s what it feels like, he said, before falling asleep on your brown shoulder. On his balcony, you kissed for Mount Washington, in a nightgown, boxers, and bare feet.”

Issue 25, Spring 2022, online.

“At fifty-one years old, Mansour had spent her entire adult life as a Sister of Mercy. She held a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but since the Vatican had long limited the roles of religious sisters to nursing, social work, and education, Mansour never received her M.D. or worked as a medical doctor as she desired. Despite these institutional constraints, from the mid-1800s, when the Sisters of Mercy opened the world’s first Mercy hospital in Pittsburgh, to the latter half of the twentieth century, women in habits – not men in mitres – were the face and backbone of Catholic healthcare in the United States. Overseeing most Catholic hospitals, religious sisters wielded spiritual authority backed by medical expertise, a role the U.S. bishops increasingly sought to replace with their own ecclesial authority.”

“O’Connell believed Catholic doctors, then organizing local physicians’ guilds, provided the morality missing from secular medicine’s “unscientific materialism” – without rejecting science outright. More than a century later, the growing traction of a self-published paper from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) challenging the safety of mifepristone reveals how Catholic institutions are not only legitimizing the ideologically motivated pseudoscience O’Connell once warned against, but also generating disinformation in the process.”

“tell the married man you don’t want to be a stopover after he tells you in that Nashville hotel room there’s a 95 percent chance we’re getting a divorce; this is how you drink yourself sick on bourbon before that night flight from Nashville to Newark; this is how you rearrange your apartment at 3 a.m.; this is how you convince yourself you did not waste the life you chose to live alone; this is how you tell the married man, it’s okay, co będzie to będzie; this is how you reach for the bottle; this is how you become okay with temporary.”

“Dead stick landing: a forced landing of an airplane when it loses all power. Commonly referred to as a crash landing.

In the early days of aviation, the New York Times rarely used the word ‘crash’ when describing the Wright Brothers’ attempts at a motor-powered flyer. The Times preferred words like ‘wreck’ and ‘fall,’ including the ‘fall of his aeroplane,’ as if Orville and Wilbur were children with a hobby.”

“The best friend never comes to Los Angeles, which is something you should’ve known. You spend the summer in the Southern California sun, writing some very strange flash fiction that contains the phrase ‘foreign moths.’ What are they, these foreign moths? Tourists on autopilot? You say something potentially interesting, potentially cliché, about desire. That it needs to be replenished. You are a foreign moth spiraling with desire.”

“The story of medicalized abortion opposition is a complicated one. For Catholic nationalist leaders, medicalizing ‘morality’ also meant re-packaging it as a form of sacred duty and patriotism.”

“Theologians will tell you that Catholic theology almost always favors both/and scenarios, yet the U.S. Catholic bishops’ crusade against abortion results in nothing but either/or positions. Take, for instance, the bishops’ newly favored form of public humiliation for Catholic politicians who support legal abortion: dangle the communion host like a carrot tied to a string.”

“As many celebrate flibanserin's FDA approval, there's a fledgling movement composed of hundreds of scientists and medical researchers still determined to block the drug from the market. To these researchers, it all boils down to the only thing we really want to know before popping the pill: Is the female Viagra safe?”

“Angelique Saavedra, an All-Options volunteer, had no idea Backline or its hotline existed when she experienced an unintended pregnancy six years ago. At the time, she had health insurance through the state of California, which only covered pregnancy expenses, and little to no access to unbiased counseling.

Most of Saavedra's information came from an adoption agency, while Internet searches gave her page after page of CPCs and religiously affiliated organizations. ‘I struggled to find support both during the process of adoption and after,’ she tells Bustle in an interview.”

“Pro-life advocates argue that laws restricting abortion should only criminalize health care providers and not their patients. But can such measures against abortion truly protect pregnant people in this current climate, where healthcare providers, friends and family members, and even community members at large are beginning to view American women and female-bodied persons of reproductive age as criminals?”

“Sex is everywhere; even when we are not talking about it, we are thinking about it. Sexual politics shape our laws and drive our economy, but what is the social force propelling these politics? In The Sex Obsession, ethicist Janet Jakobsen claims that the ‘common sense’ story delivers just one answer: Because religion. Unsatisfied with this answer, Jakobsen presents a sweeping, critical analysis of how assumptions about sex and religion reproduce a grand narrative that pits sexual conservatism against secular progress: To want sexual freedom means to denounce religion and to be religious means denouncing sexual freedom.”

“What Abortion: Stories Women Tell does highlight is not only the complete erasure of women from the political dis­cussion on abortion, but also the com­plete absence of men from women’s abortion experiences. This dichotomy is striking and present in almost every scene of the documentary. Patients like Mercedes, who became pregnant with a married man, or Monique, who had an abortion to save herself from her abusive husband and ‘had no one to tell,’ are left on their own. Meanwhile, the juxtapo­sition of the shouting male clinic pro­testers with the compassionate female clinic employees is downright haunting.”

“Known nationally as the ‘Doctor of Last Resort,’ Tiller was one of the few physicians willing to do late abortions in the U.S. The words he placed on the exterior of his embattled clinic have become a pro-choice battle cry: ‘Trust Women.’ As documentary film director Lana Wilson explains, ‘It was never about him—always about the patient.’”

“I’ve been writing about abortion since 2012, when I joined Ms. magazine as an editorial assistant. I was 23. One Friday evening, I perused LexusNexus for state legislature alerts and found a bill that no national outlet had yet to cover: A Georgia ‘fetal pain’ bill that initially outlawed all pregnancy terminations after 20 weeks, even if the fetus was non-viable. In defending the bill, a Georgia representative compared farmers to doctors and pregnant people to cows. If farmers delivered dead calves, he argued, then why couldn’t women carry deceased fetuses to term?

I cheekily labeled the bill: women as livestock.”