Carrie La Seur’s critically acclaimed debut novel The Home Place (William Morrow 2014) won the High Plains Book Award, was short-listed for the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel, and was an IndieNext pick, a Library Journal pick, one of the Great Falls Tribune’s Top 10 Montana Books for 2014, and a Florida SunSentinel Best Crime Fiction pick for 2014. Her second novel, The Weight of An Infinite Sky (William Morrow 2018), a family drama set in southern Montana and loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was a finalist for the Reading the West award from the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association and featured in a series of events by One Book One Bozeman as its 2020 city-wide read.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Session and the 2019 Tin House Novel Writing Workshop, and a Susannah McCorkle Scholar at the 2016 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Carrie publishes widely, including in Alaska Quarterly Review; Daily Beast; Grist; the Guardian; Harvard Law and Policy Review; High Country News; Huffington Post; Kenyon Review Online; Montana Quarterly; Mother Jones; Ploughshares blog, and Yale Journal of International Law. See the bibliography below for updates.
Carrie’s résumé includes a degree in English and French magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College, a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate in modern languages from Oxford University, and a Yale law degree. She has always been a writer. In 2006, she founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states and played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign. “I’m still involved in Plains Justice, but I went back to private practice in 2012. Running a nonprofit takes a unique blend of selflessness and enough raging narcissism to think you really can change the world. The burnout rate is similar to that of telemarketers.” Carrie was also the founding board chair of This House of Books, the Billings (MT) Bookstore Cooperative, a community-owned independent bookstore opened in 2016.
Bibliography
Fiction:
▪ “A Fairly Ordinary Fool”, Alaska Quarterly Review (Fall/Winter 2020)
▪ “The Girl on the Roof”, Bangalore Review, Vol. VII, Issue No. 9, April 2020
▪ “The Angel of Caracas”, Nelle (Issue 3, 2020)
▪ “The SUP Goddess”, Up North Lit (Winter 2019)
▪ Excerpt from The Home Place, Montana Land Reliance anthology A Million Acres: Montana Writers Reflect on Land and Open Space (2019)
▪ “Warm Milk”, Rappahannock Review, Issue 6.1 (December 2018), with an author interview
▪ The Weight of an Infinite Sky (William Morrow, January 2018), paperback release: October 2018
▪ “Bad Blood”, Montana Noir anthology (September 2017, Akashic Press)
▪ “Colt the Bull-Riding Hasid”, Sandstone: An Anthology to Support This House of Books (August 2017)
▪ The Home Place (William Morrow, July 2014)
Poetry:
▪ “Ephemera”, Kosmos Quarterly (2019)
▪ “These Women Tonight”, The Vitni Review (2019)
▪ “Huntley Butte” and “Trailer Trash”, Museum of Americana Issue 17, March 2019
▪ “The Iowa”, From Everywhere a Little: A Migration Anthology (Water’s Edge Press 2019)
▪ “American Family”, Inscape (2019)
Nonfiction:
▪ Without immigration courts, Montana is tough for immigrants seeking a new life, The Daily Montanan (February 2023)
▪ “Let Them Eat Bread: Montana’s French Bakeries”, Montana Quarterly (Winter 2022)
▪ Derailed: Life Off the Tenure Track, The Daily Montanan (March 2022)
▪ “Dealing With Montana’s Rape Crisis”, Montana Quarterly (Winter 2021)
▪ “The Rich Nez Perce: Reflections on Montana Settler Stories”, Gallatin History Quarterly (Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter 2021)
▪ “Disentangling the Law in Indian Country”, Montana Quarterly (Winter 2020)
▪ Garden Journal of a Death Foretold, Ploughshares blog (August 2019)
▪ Review of Heartland by Sarah Smarsh, Kenyon Review Online (March 2019)
▪ An Interview With Carrie La Seur Following ‘A Working Class Death, Frederica Morgan Davis, True – Proximity Magazine (January 2019)
▪ A Working Class Death, True – Proximity Magazine (October 2018), reprinted in Inscape (2019)
▪ “Motivation and Humanity: A Conversation With Carrie La Seur,” Christine Sneed, The Rumpus (March 2018)
▪ “Messy and Complicated and Real: A Conversation With Laura Pritchett,” Carrie La Seur, The Rumpus (March 2018)
▪ “How to keep independent bookstores alive,” High Country News (December 2016)
▪ “Live Tweeting Hospital Price-Gouging,” Huffington Post (December 2016)
▪ “Hiring Anybody With Arms: a documentary glimpse into the Dakota oil boom,” Huffington Post (September 2016)
▪ “Deep in the American West: meet Harry Koyama, a beet farmer with an artist’s soul,” The Guardian (June 2016)
▪ “On The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa,” Kenyon Review Online (Spring 2016)
▪ “Little Miracles Everywhere, Or How Billings, Montana Got Its Bookstore Mojo Back,” Huffington Post (April 2016)
▪ “A Montana Goodbye for Ivan Doig,” Huffington Post (August 2015)
▪ “The Coal Royalty Loophole That’s Costing the US Hundreds of Millions,” Huffington Post (August 2015)
▪ “Oversights and Omissions in Federal Review of Another Rail Spur for Montana Coal,” Huffington Post (June 2015)
▪ “Why Vetoing Keystone XL Isn’t Nearly Enough,” Huffington Post (February 2015)
▪ “Book Bag: Gritty Stories from the Real Montana,” Daily Beast (October 2014)
▪ “Recommendations for Reform of North Dakota’s Produced Water Regulatory Program, Based on a Review of National Best Practices,” Oil, Gas, & Energy Law (OGEL 5, 2013)
▪ “A Working Mom … Like My Grandmothers,” Huffington Post (February 2013)
▪ “Forty Years after NEPA’s Enactment, It Is Time for a Comprehensive Farm Bill Environmental Impact Statement,” Harvard Law and Policy Review (May 2013)
▪ “Needed: A 50-State Strategy on Climate,” Mother Jones (September 2010)
▪ “How Merchant Coal Is Changing the Face of America,” Grist (August 2006)
▪ “The Foreigner As Fetish,” Salon (July 1999)
▪ “Can I Trust You?” Salon (June 1999)
▪ “The Long Rhodes Home,” Salon (May 1999)
Author photo by Dewey Vanderhoff taken at Trail Town, Cody, WY