Laura Potts

Laura Potts is the prodigal daughter of a hardware store empire near Hell, Michigan. But despite an appreciation for drill bits, roofing nails and that old chestnut about the creek freezing over, she was better with words and punctuation than nuts and bolts. Also she was pretty rubbish at maths.

Armed with a B.A. in journalism, she headed for the broken lights of the big city, spending a number of years avoiding the feral dogs, decrepit infrastructure and moody garage rockers that comprised Detroit in the early noughties. As a staff writer for The Associated Press and the Detroit Free Press, she wrote about everything from gay gun-rights groups to the Michigan Militia, and interviewed everyone from President Bill Clinton to Eminem.

Still, it seemed there might be a more exciting place to be. So she moved to rural East Anglia.

Laura continues to report, write and edit, but she’s traded the safe confines and tacit parameters of the newsroom for the wondrous world of the web. She still gets by without streetlights, but doesn’t encounter nearly as many wild dogs.