Lauren LaRocca is an award-winning writer and editor who has worked for 15 years in newspapers and magazines with a focus on arts and culture, the environment, health, and spirituality. She spent most of her life in Appalachia (Pittsburgh, Western Maryland, Asheville, and West Virginia), stopped in Baltimore for a short time, lived in Northern New Mexico through the pandemic and now lives nomadically. In addition to her lifelong compulsion for writing, her interests in transpersonal psychology, astrology, dreamwork, energy work, and plant medicine led her to become an astrologer and herbalist. Her writing has appeared in Enchanted Living Magazine, Baltimore magazine, Pittsburgh City Paper, Lines + Stars, and Hidden City Quarterly, among others.