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I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. 

Every takeoff is the same, but I am always on alert for the one that will be different. In Bosnia or Boston. Panama or Palm Springs. On short dirt strips in Venezuela or the long asphalt runways of JFK. Every takeoff, I am looking for an engine failure. 

I have been trained to suspect failure. By flight instructors. By my brother. Every time his voicemail is full, I am looking for my brother. Suspecting relapse. When we were little, my brother and I loved games that involved evading, hiding, running. We’d spend entire days climbing the long roots of banyan trees, perching behind philodendron bushes, using green elephant ears as camouflage. 

I cannot remember how many times my brother has been through rehab. Like my flying layovers, the stays merge in memory. Florida, Mississippi, Illinois, Minnesota. When his clean clock starts again, I say that I am hopeful. But each time, I am wary. He keeps his life concealed. In our family, none of us know which drugs he uses. Or if he still drinks. I don’t know why he has had so many court appearances. My parents know more than the rest of us, but they don’t share. I don’t know why he has lost jobs, what his triggers are, when he’s last seen his son. My siblings and I try to triangulate: what is lie, what is truth, what is unknown. For decades, we have tried to puzzle our brother’s troubles. For decades, we have failed. 

Now I helm an overweight cargo plane, fat with electronic surveillance equipment weighing down the fuselage. It’s approaching one hundred degrees in Tucson. The stakes of this takeoff are high. This particular plane, a four-engine turboprop “Herk,” is heavier than any other Herk I have flown. I have signed a slip—a waiver on my life. I’ve accepted a takeoff risk, in the name of surveillance. Surveillance my plane will carry out. The plane is heavy with secrets. 

I’ve been told not to look at the cargo my plane is carrying on this mission in Arizona—even the electronic equipment is veiled. I am not allowed to know what the Intelligence crew in the back is monitoring, what they are learning, gathering. I am shepherd to their secrets, taking them to the spot in the sky where they can spy. This is how the war is fought. 

A plane that is too heavy, taking off from an airfield where the temperature is too high, creates risk. If I need to abort at high speed, the plane’s brakes can overheat and catch on fire. Takeoff and Landing Data is the math surrounding every flight on any airplane. The equation is bulletproof. The flight engineer calculates a number we will look for on the airspeed dial when we roll down the runway. If there’s an emergency before reaching that crucial speed, the pilot will apply the brakes and the plane will stop on the remaining runway. After that number, the pilot will take the broken plane into the air, circle back around, and land. 

We practice failure at the most vulnerable time—right at this decision point airspeed. In the simulator, we take off with a broken plane again and again. Circle around. Land. This is how we learn to manage the risk of losing something essential at the most inconvenient time: an engine, the hydraulic pressure, the electrics. 

My brother’s sobriety is vulnerable at Christmas, New Year’s, family birthdays, Thanksgiving. And during times of stress: our Dad’s triple bypass, our mother’s kidney surgery. This year, I tried to practice his absence. I didn’t invite him to Thanksgiving. I didn’t acknowledge his birthday. I have practiced losing—his raucous humor at the dinner table, our shared memories of past holidays together, his goofy voice with my sons, who adore him. This decision thrust me into a free fall of second-guessing. 

My brother has only confided in me once. He called me, sobbing, to say he had let his son down, failed to pick him up from hockey practice. That he had lost another good job, and the friends he had there. “Everything I have done in life,” he said, “I have only failed.” No matter how much I tried to offer hope, I could tell he was falling with no bottom, no net, no relief. 

Decades ago, we’d hide and seek. Our slight torsos concealed behind palm tree trunks or against the row of old foreign sports cars our dad bought for a few hundred bucks. An orange Fiat, a beige MGB. None of them started anymore. In the neighbor’s pool, eyes closed, I’d call out, “Marco.” He’d reply, “Polo.” Then a splash. When he was “it,” I swam in a constant quiver of fear. Dodging him was hard because he was a swifter, stronger swimmer. I always wanted to win. And my fear was that I might not. That is when I started to cheat. In the pool. As Monopoly banker. During Candy Land. I learned to evade. I learned to calculate and mitigate risk. 

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In Tucson, the plane is too heavy. The temperature is too high. The equation does not add up. But we take off anyway. These are my authorized risks. Sanctioned. At eighteen, I wasn’t physically strong enough to enter the Air Force. I failed the pull-up test, had to wait a year to reapply. My brother was the athlete, able to reach over the outfield wall with an open mitt, make the catch, and send the batter back to the dugout. He could dive to the corner of a soccer net, block every shot. Kick the winning field goal. Glide through relays on swim team, individual medleys, the high dive. He had exquisite grace: pointed toes, minimal splash, no fear of heights. He sliced the flat blue water with his body. I wasn’t athletic. When I failed the fitness test for the Air Force Academy, my brother helped me run faster, train harder, lift more weight. To reach the stoplight at Linton and A1A before turning toward home. Kick your legs. Kick your legs. My brother’s help allowed me to leave our family as it was breaking apart, leave our house where the roof leaked, the electric bills went unpaid, and the fridge was often empty. The house where we walked over the broken, crumbling ceiling, to reach the shower. 

Each morning of the mission, when I climb the ladder into the cockpit, the screens in my periphery glow green neon. The machines are bolted into the back of the plane, the area where I’m not allowed to look. I push the throttles up to max power, begin the takeoff roll. My plane is lumbering. The secret weight is heavy; safety is not guaranteed unless every takeoff is flawless, no irregularities, no malfunctions. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. 

I only know fragments about this mission: counter-drug, Mexican airspace, a holding pattern. I will fly through the Contiguous US Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), a ribbon of air that surrounds my country. Fighter jets are scrambled if unidentified planes cross the Contiguous US ADIZ. Contiguous means sharing a common border. My brother and I share a common childhood, but we enter separate countries of adulthood. I operate in authorized, sanctioned risk. He lives in the unauthorized, unsanctioned. 

All my deployments, up until this one, have been dynamic. Each day, a different mission. Some deployments, a different country each flight. Carrying troops on a Monday and medical teams with their patients on Tuesday. Army grunts jumping out of the plane from 500 feet over a dusty drop zone, or Navy Seals from 10,000 feet—so high everyone needs oxygen when the ramp opens to let them jump out. But this temporary duty is the same every day. Takeoff, enter holding. Hold for five or six hours, land. For two months, each sortie is the same. When I trace the original meaning of “to hold,” I learn that in the 1500s it meant “to sustain, bear, endure, ‘stand’ (some treatment).” 

I watch my parents sustain, bear, endure decades. My brother is reliable in his unceasing absences. I read my teenage sons’ texts to their uncle, pleading for his safety. I want to howl in anger. Or weep in despair. Why, I wonder, did I let my sons learn to love him. 

Whenever I call my parents at home in South Florida, they say Everything’s good. Good. “Everything” is what we call my brother’s recovery and his relapses, his sobriety and his absences. An open code we all understand. Our conversations trace the make-believe of addiction. The secret, hidden family cargo. We do not even let each other look at it.  

For six straight weeks, I take off again and again in Tucson. I strap into the cockpit, set the altimeter, listen to the weather report. I am belted beneath a five-point restraint harness. It crosses my chest, clicks at the center, where I keep my own secrets. Hide them behind the fabric of my olive flight suit, seal them with stubborn zippers. I will never tell anyone on my crew that each day on the plane, before starting all four engines, I think of my brother, addicted to the drugs that the government pays me to find, to track, to help destroy. Shame is a contiguous border I share with my brother. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California.  

The engine instruments are all analog. Dials stacked in a column. White hash marks within a glass circle. I am always scanning for green: within limits. Good on all four, the flight engineer says when we line up for takeoff. Roger, good to go, I hear myself say. I divide my world into a binary. My work in these government missions: positive. Addiction: negative. With this division, I try to keep my mind complexity-free, in the column of Good, Green, Go. Like my flight instruments. But when the government asks me for secrecy in return for flying this mission, my binary blurs along the seam. The family therapy sessions have taught me one necessity: radical honesty is requirement for recovery. Not just for my brother, but for all of us. Every morning, I climb the stairs to the cockpit, uncomfortable in this secret-holding. The familiar feeling of keeping. 

I agree to not know of this mission, to not advertise, recite, or remember. I nevermind. I compartmentalize. I take off over the southwest desert: ochre, red clay, and palm. I point my plane toward blue: the Gulf of California, the sky. 

When we were little, no one called me and my brother by our given names. I was Missey, and he was Remy. Back then, we loved to play the board game Risk. We spent hours counting, lining up, re-counting. Small square pieces—armies of pink and black, countries with cardboard borders, a white trace, like an ADIZ, drawn around green and yellow continents. 

I fly to a designated holding point, turn to enter a pattern. I fly for hours in a circle in the sky so the surveillance team can monitor the movement of the drugs, the movement of the people who make the drugs, the movement of the boats that carry, the planes that fly, the hands that buy the drugs. I turn over in my mind: no one on my crew would suspect my brother. They have an image in their minds, and he doesn’t fit it. He is athletic, neatly shaven, and white. 

I remember running barefoot along the dock with my brother. We grew up on water in a wooden sailboat, docked at Slip #2 at the public marina before we lived on land. We sailed and slept on our ketch, The Mother Goose. In summer, no one knew where we spent our hours. We’d wake to find a note with cash from one of our parents written on a napkin in the boat’s galley: $1.50 for breakfast at Ken & Hazels. Our parents were doing their thing, and we were doing ours. There is a blue gulf between me and my brother. Risk is a border we share. 

In the v-berth—the front of the sailboat, a monohull—we were rocked to sleep by the ocean and the Intercoastal. We fished, hopscotched, drew with chalk on the marina sidewalk. In our childhood without a TV, phone, a place for toys—we were each other’s compass and ballast.  

I have signed the slip. Sworn myself to secrecy. By law, I will not tell of this mission. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. This is how the war is fought. 

If scientists call it a disease, why do we call it a War on— 

Is the terror the drug itself or the addict? 

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One year, I received a birthday card from my brother when he was in jail. Or prison. I’m not sure which it was. Just like I don’t know the roots of his addiction. He was so proud that he managed to send me a birthday card on time for the first time in his adult life. Glue was not allowed in his facility—not even the trace of glue on the backs of envelopes—so he sealed his letter with toothpaste. He was proud of this ingenuity. 

The terror is neither. The terror is the possibility of losing the war, of losing the addict. The terror is how children born from and raised by the same mother and father can fork into such different life paths. The terror is the repetition of losing and regaining. Missing, returning. 

I held the envelope to my nose, inhaled. Mint. I wasn’t sure what weighed more: shame or sadness. I tucked the letter into the back of my closet, behind all my sweaters—a place where only I could find it. It was his beautiful penmanship that got me—the perfect cursive letters looping and connecting, my address as straight and orderly as if the paper had been lined. I find it sometimes. Forget it’s hidden there, in the back. I’ll be searching for something to wear when I find it. In Montessori school, where my father worked so we could attend, I taught my brother how to trace the sandpaper cursive letters. I taught him the loop in a cursive p, l, e. 

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Aviators call it a holding pattern—turning again and again over a single point in the sky. Correcting for winds, I trace, retrace myself. “Hack,” I say, as the needle on my instrument swings to indicate we are passing over the holding fix.

Each new turn, back into the same pattern again. Pilots call this flying drilling holes in the sky. I keep time in the sky with my stopwatch to measure the length of a holding leg. I’ve never known secret-keeping to be met with Good, Green, Go. If addiction were a plane, it would orbit over each body in the addict’s circle. Fueling, refueling. Always aloft. 

Every day, I am being paid to keep secrets, and during those five or six hours in the sky to think about the secrets my brother keeps. Am I my brother’s keeper? I vacillate on the idea of “keeping.” Sometimes, I am his advocate, urging, Just one more treatment round. Pleading with my parents to find a way to afford it. Other times, I am done. Sick of it. Either route I take, I do not arrive anywhere.

We fly early each day, when the temperature is coolest. We complete the same flight plan. Repeat, repeat, repeat. We return to the fix. Accumulating flight hours, experience, promotion material. The fuel bladders in the wings are nearing empty, so I descend back toward Earth. Deplaning, I want to look left, where it’s dark in the fuselage. Where the secrets are kept. 

My brother returns late. He accumulates tolerance, invincibility, future court dates. Our mother found him in the garage, keeled over. The paramedics found him in his car, keeled over. The ambulance medics bruised his chest when he was keeled over, made him breathe again. One Narcan, two Narcan, two more Narcan. We wonder how he is still alive. 

Our father loves to talk about our sailboat’s wooden hull and steel keel. He is amazed, all these decades on, at the depth of the keel. Eight feet. They don’t make them like that anymore. I think about the times our boat ran aground, in large part due to that depth. It was safer to be in the deeper water, but our parents kept sailing too close to shore. We’d wait for hours for the tide to rise, for the boat to be loosened from the sand, for the sail to fill with wind again. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. 

I learn a person can waive their right to additional medical attention, after an ambulance is called, after the medics have revived their life (often with Narcan), as long as there is a person (often a mother) who can be pressured to sign the first responder’s slip when she finds her son in the garage. This is why it’s called a war, I think. The unending grief of mothers. 

To prepare for war, pilots go through interrogation training. We learn the art of avoiding a forced confession. Never sign, they tell us in training. Never sign it. 

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No one wants to be at the family therapy session. Everyone has their own narrative. Listening to the addict, or the sisters, or the brothers, or the addiction specialist, or the intake assessor, or our own heartbeats—the equation will not add up. In the family therapy session, the conversation with the addiction specialist feels like a confession. Reminds me of being in a dark booth with a priest I could not see. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I was trained to acknowledge my sin, to find fault in something I did or didn’t do. Then, according to the formula, I would gain relief and forgiveness in reciting a prayer or a petition. I can’t remember the words of the family therapist anymore. I remember our circle. I remember my parents were prompted to confess their aiding and abetting. We, the siblings, were prompted to confess our aiding and abetting. Guilty, we pled. Guilty. 

Yes, we paid for that. 

Yes, I picked him up from—

No, we didn’t think to— 

Once. I think—

Yes, we went to a counselor who— 

I don’t remember—  

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Decades ago, I left my brother for the Air Force, for stability. I was eighteen when I left the family. He continued caretaking of our two baby siblings as our parents divorced. Is it possible, I wonder, to have survivor’s guilt if everyone is still alive? At the recovery center, I sign the check with funds from my Air Force paycheck. And leave him there. 

I think about mothers, the chain of command—inadequate budgets, badges of indiscriminate oversight. The way love becomes a currency on which an addict relies. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California.  

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If my brother is an addict, and I am deployed as a tool for the “War on Drugs,” I wonder if there are battle lines between us. I’ve been conditioned since taking the Oath of Allegiance: Every war has a moral side and an amoral side. I cling to thinking that I am on the side of “good” even when doubt creeps in like a thief. There’s a fault somewhere. A reason for the plague of his addiction, an explanation for relapse. I became the good kid. And sometimes, I join my brother in resenting myself for it. 

I want the war to end. I want my brother to live. I watch for the arrow to drop on the instrument called a “Non-Directional Beacon.” Watch for the needle to swing. That’s when I know it’s time to turn the plane in holding. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. 

My brother’s then-girlfriend called. Look at his arms for needle tracks. She, an addict herself, was furious. She wanted me to see that he was high. Verify it. I did not want to be my brother’s keeper. He arrived, wearing long sleeves. He seemed normal. I said this in my mind with a question mark at the end: He seems normal? What is normal when you have a few weeks clean, no money, no job, and a long shadow? 

For six straight weeks, there are no clouds over Tucson. In the country of currency, victory in this war is— 

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I have briefed the crew. In the event of an emergency, the last thing I will do before leaving the airplane is set the parking brake. Everyone will meet one hundred feet off the nose. It can be hard to find each other if there is smoke or fire. We need a predetermined way to reassemble. At the rendezvous point, I will make sure everyone is safe and accounted for. I try to do this in my family. I crave a rendezvous point for us. But we’re often scattered in the sweep of my brother’s addiction. What one sibling knows is veiled from another. Sometimes, I think we believe it’s a form of kindness—a hope that omission will mean they will not worry like we are worrying. But the addiction experts assure us that this isn’t kindness. I crave a rendezvous point with my brother; a predetermined route where we can find him. I crave the surety of the addiction specialists—their fluency in knowing wrong from right. In the hours when I cannot sleep, I also crave their dispassionate regard for my brother. 

If the plane is above the critical number in the engineer’s equation, it cannot stop on the remaining runway. I will manage the emergency in the air and circle around to land. These are the hypotheticals I brief each day, readying my crew for disaster on the flightline. They never happen on this deployment, this runway, this time. But they will happen. To me and to nearly every pilot I know. Emergencies are the inevitability of flight. Pilots are consoled with this knowledge by preparation, training, simulators. I try to transfer this attitude—that I can train my emotions for a hypothetical family tragedy. I am overtrained for the one disaster that my brother says he doesn’t even fear. In Tucson, I have signed a waiver agreeing to accept a higher degree of risk than I have trained for. This is what you do in war. 

Before takeoff, our skills and training are greater than airborne catastrophe, offsetting the risk. But in Tucson, the math changes. There is a “not equal” sign between me and the sky if an engine catches fire, flames out, hits a bird, leaks oil, or has fluctuating rpm. The plane is too heavy for the math to add up the way it should. We know this and we accept this and we sign the waiver and I push the throttles up to max and take off. Fourteen times, on other runways, in other countries, on other missions, in other wars, I have lost an engine or had to shut one down. If I pray for safety on takeoff, if I am kept safe at each critical point of liftoff, does that ensure I help to win the war? I will know we’ve won the war when— 

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Every afternoon in childhood, my brother and I would wait for our parents to pick us up from middle school. By then, I used my given name. No longer Missey. But he still went by Remy. Hours passed. And finally we’d give up waiting. We’d walk the long college campus where our parents taught, head to the Student Center to buy malted milk balls and black licorice. We sat on oversized couches, tuned into after-school shows. Brady Bunch, Flipper, Gilligan’s Island. We watched our own shows on separate TVs in the large student lounge. I remember when the commercials started. The announcer holding up an egg (“This is your brain”). Then pointing to a Teflon pan (“This is drugs”). Then, the cracking. A zooming in to sizzling, fried eggs. “This is your brain on—” 

In war, surrender means losing. Accepting a loss. In recovery, surrender means acceptance, serenity. I wonder if my brother—at times a small business owner, a college football player-turned-coach, a regular in the hockey stands for his son—wants to win his war. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. 

Every holding pattern has an entry point called a “fix”—a precise point in space defined by latitude and longitude. When an airplane enters holding, it begins to fly an oval pattern, orbiting back to the fix. Continuously in motion, but arriving nowhere. My brother turns again and again, reliable as cardinal directions. Addiction defines a point he returns to: return to the fix, return to the fix, return to the fix. 

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It is 1998. In due time, more than a decade from now, the Global Commission on Drug Policy will declare, “The global war on drugs has failed…” It will “have devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”

Each morning of the mission, I take off over the Air Force Boneyard. The spot where the dead planes are parked. Over 2,600 acres of over 4,000 abandoned planes. Aluminum, steel, titanium. Thousands, once powerful, are discarded, laid to rest in rows of oblivion, of disuse, of the forgotten. From above, the airplane carcasses signify a loss of ordered potential. Their noses all point the same way. Their wings, like arms, are splayed. Unmoving. As I climb higher, the planes begin to look like feathers, tiny birds, bird bones. 

The boneyard collects planes of all types—bombers, fighters, cargo, trainers. Hundreds of B-52 bombers were flown to the boneyard in the late 1990s as part of an arms control treaty with Russia. A single B-52 spreads 185 feet of wingspan. These B-52s had to be chopped into five large pieces so Russian satellites could fly overhead and verify the planes had been decommissioned. Like the Russians, my family and I have craved verification over the years. This is a product of the diction of lies and the syntax of secrecy. 

I climb to my assigned altitude, all my plane’s dials are in the green. Just before the old, moored planes become too small to see from this height, I look down. From the air, the fading rows of parked wings and all of the abandoned hulls are beautiful in their symmetry. They look like pewter jacks. A bit higher, and they all but disappear. Miniature stars against desert taupe. 

I revisit the dictionary for the origins of the phrase “to hold.” I read that in 1330, it meant “confinement, custody, imprisonment.” The ache I feel when I read this definition pings in my chest and I think of my brother. I wish he’d talk to me about the origins of his addiction. I wish I had the courage to ask. My ignorance feels as wide as the sky. I circle my question in silence. I secret my wondering away. I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. I don’t understand why flying through a combat zone feels easier than talking to my brother about his addiction. Give me a bullet to deflect, a forest to evade capture through, or a heat-seeking missile to maneuver away from. But give me the chance to ask him about his addiction, and I cower. For too many decades, he has recited a pattern of lies. I am tired. But part of me wonders, could I hold whatever his primal wound might be? 

Before the drugs, I was the only family member who spent years by my brother’s side. We held the lines of the boat for each other as we each jumped onto the deck. In a Montessori school picture, I am teaching him to slice red apples with a sharp knife. “Like this.” I thought I was good at keeping him safe. One year, my brother said the addiction center had rows of beds, but not one of them was open. He was on the waiting list. When a bed opened, he gave the spot to his girlfriend. There are gaps. Guesses. I wonder, now, about my brother’s letter sealed with mint toothpaste. Maybe it wasn’t pride he was feeling. Maybe it was something closer to the emotions that come with being reduced to smearing paste onto the backs of envelopes. Treatment has never solved my brother’s addiction. A therapist once asked me why I was so upset by his need for further rounds of treatment. “Would you question another round of treatment for a patient whose cancer has come back?” he asked. 

When a pilot enters holding, Air Traffic Control issues an “EFC,” a time to “Expect Further Clearance.” It’s like being on hold with customer service when the prerecorded voice says, Your hold time is approximately twenty-two minutes. Pilots can expect to leave the holding pattern at the EFC. If a pilot loses communication with Air Traffic Control, they will be safe from a midair collision by leaving the holding fix at the EFC. I love these rules of flying—how they cover the remote cases of “Lost Comm,” or “Lost Communication.” Everything has already been anticipated. Even worst-case scenarios. There’s a prescribed action to land safely. Even as a passenger on an airliner, I am comforted by the rules of holding. To the groans of rows of passengers, the captain announces there is weather over the field or too much air congestion at our destination: “Folks, we’re just going to hold here for a bit. We’ll hopefully get you on the ground shortly.” Always the optimists on delays, pilots convey nothing of the intricacies of what they do to enter the holding pattern. On its surface, holding is simple—tracing circles in the sky. 

But what airspeed to fly when holding? What altitude? What type of entry procedure? Which way to turn? How long are the holding legs? Are they defined by distance or time? Is there enough fuel on board with the assigned EFC? Pilots consider all these factors each time they are told to hold. 

I have tried to peel back the complexity of addiction. I’ve dissected addiction memoirs like an eighth grader in biology class slicing through a dead frog to know its inside. As much as I’ve tried to peel back my own ignorance, I know my attempts to understand addiction are futile. I’m like a passenger in the back of a 737 who thinks if they learn the rules of holding and draw it out on a napkin, they’ll be able to fly it. Over our lifetimes, I have regularly lost contact with my brother. Or, he has chosen to sever contact with me. When we go “Lost Comm,” at some point, I send a text. I pray it will turn blue: Delivered. I click the autopilot on and release my hold on the yoke of my heavy cargo plane. I watch as the Herk turns itself into perfect bank angles, tracing over contrails. Oval arcs of holding. 

My brother is yoked to the disease. And we, his family, are yoked to our hope. When my brother is missing, a family member emails a “Prayer-of-the-Day.” It begins, I will restore you the years the Locust has won. Whenever my brother is missing, I wrap his death like a flak vest around my heart, thinking I can prepare myself the way I could protect myself from a bullet in a combat zone. But is the death the flak vest or the bullet? I’m asking because I do not know. The phone call has not come, but I constantly return to rehearsing that un-news. In this way, I fool myself into thinking there’s a way to ease into tragedy. 

A week ago, my brother entered treatment again. Leading up to it, our family phone calls were brief. Will he go to treatment or not? When will he go? Why won’t he go? I can’t remember what number this one is. I have intentionally stopped counting, stopped remembering. As he checks himself in, we breathe. We sleep.

 

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LAURA JOYCE-HUBBARD’s work appears in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction was selected as a Notable in Best American Essays 2022 and 2023 and was a winner of the 2023 AWP Intro Journals Project. She won The Iowa Review’s 2022 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans, the 2021 Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest at Southeast Review, and the Individual Poem Prize (2021) and Essay Prize (2020) in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition. Laura’s work has been supported by Writing by Writers, the Ragdale Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center, Longleaf Writers, and the National Endowment for the Arts with a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a twenty-year veteran of the US Air Force where she was among the first women to pilot C-130s into the combat zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina, leading NATO peacekeeping missions. An MFA candidate at Northwestern University, Laura is currently serving as a fiction editor for TriQuarterly and as the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate in Illinois. Find her on Instagram @Laurajh.