Laurie Boris has always been fascinated with words. As a toddler, she scrawled them on her sheets with crayon. As a young child, she nabbed encyclopedia volumes off the shelves and taught herself how to read, shocking her mother at the dinner table by knowing that a kumquat was a member of the orange family. She wrote for her high school literary magazine and newspaper, and while she embarked on a career as a graphic designer after college, she still kept a daily journal and grabbed any opportunity to write on the job.

A 2005 back injury caused her to reevaluate her career choices, and she became a freelance writer and editor, something she’d wanted to do for years. Growing a new business, finding clients and keeping them happy made preserving her fiction writing time that much more critical. “If I don’t schedule it like an appointment,” she said, “it doesn’t get done.” 

She prefers to write contemporary fiction, and to use humor when it fits the characters and situation. “Imagine the little happy dance I was doing when Frankie [Goldberg, the protagonist of The Joke’s on Me] showed up—a stand-up comic.” 

The Joke’s on Me, from 4RV Publishing, is her first published novel. She's published two more since then. When she’s not writing, Boris likes to cook, read, and watch baseball—not necessarily in that order, and in varying combinations. She is also a contributing author and associate editor for IndiesUnlimited.com.