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Laurie Duesing was born in Wisconsin, spent her adolescence in upstate New York, and migrated to the California Bay Area for graduate work, where she lived until 2006, when she moved to Louisville to join her family. Her passion has always been language, and, inspired by two splendid high school English teachers, she graduated from Harpur College (now State University New York at Binghamton) with an English major (1965, cum laude). She crossed the country to attend the University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student in English Literature, receiving her MA in 1967.
Feeling as if she had spent her whole life as a student, she became a teacher of English in a central California high school for one year before becoming a full-time English instructor at Solano Community College. In a department that encouraged its members to teach a variety of courses, her courses included Survey of English Literature, Survey of American Literature, Introduction to Drama, to Introduction to the Modern Novel, remedial English and creative writing.
In 1981, she was accepted to a course at the University of California at Berkeley titled “Poems in Progress”, though she had only written a dozen poems at the time. Over several years in the course, she had the good fortune to study with several well-known American poets. Subsequently, her poems were published in Three West Coast Women; her chapbook Hard Kisses was published in 2000 (Swan Scythe Press, UC Davis). She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment of the Arts Award in Poetry.
Her interest in poetry took her back to school at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she was granted a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry in 1992. Relishing this return to academia, she continued on at UC Davis as a PhD candidate in English Literature, where she was awarded the degree in 1998.
As part of the doctoral requirements, she had to demonstrate proficiency in two languages, and one of her choices was Latin. She became “smitten” by Latin and vowed to study it more fully when she finished her degree. That vow has been kept, and she studied Latin for a year at the community college where she taught. Then, when she moved to Louisville, she began attending U of L, where she has studied Latin for the past year and a half. She continues this fall in an upper-division seminar concentrating on Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and she works in the Reach Center as U of L’s Latin tutor.
Dr. Duesing is also an amateur musician, studying flute with Jean Hutchinson, and playing with the flute choir, the Panpipes, and the Bellarmine Wind Ensemble. Interested in all levels and types of education, she is a volunteer at Pitt Academy (a school for developmentally disabled children), where she helps teach music. She also very much enjoys her neighborhood (Clifton) and writes for her neighborhood newsletter, The Clifton Quarterly.
