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Laurie Boyle Crompton is the YA author of THE DENIM DIARIES: a memoir (Zest/Lerner 2023), PRETTY IN PUNXSUTAWNEY and FREAKY IN FRESNO (Blink/HarperCollins 2019, 2020) as well as ADRENALINE CRUSH (Macmillan/2014, Square Fish/2016), BLAZE (or Love in the Time of Supervillains), THE REAL PROM QUEENS OF WESTFIELD HIGH and LOVE AND VANDALISM (Sourcebooks/2013, 2014, 2017). Growing up in ‘Pennsyltucky’ in the 1980s, Laurie couldn't wait to escape rural life. After saving up her tips from waitressing at a local greasy spoon at 18 she packed up her acid wash jeans and moved to NY...where everyone else had stopped wearing acid wash.

 

After wrestling with an eating disorder for most of her young adult life, Laurie became determined to redeem the time she’d wasted counting calories and fixating on the size of her butt. She began creating activist artwork promoting body love and built the popular website Dreamer-girl.com, an anti-starvation imagery site that attracted nearly one thousand unique visitors each week for four years at its height. Laurie loves to speak about media awareness and body image in high schools, colleges, and churches where she has shared her journey to healing with thousands of teens and new adults. Laurie has run numerous weekend team building workshops centered on body acceptance and was invited to present her work at the 2009 National Eating Disorder Conference in Philadelphia. She remains dedicated to spreading the word that natural curves are beautiful, starving to achieve a thigh gap is not a worthy life goal, and the only way to get a beach body is to plant your dear body on the beach. 

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She graduated first in her class from St. John’s University with a BA in English and Journalism. Since then, Laurie has written for national magazines like GLAMOUR and ALLURE, survived a teaching stint at an all-boy high school, and appeared on Good Day New York several times as a Toy Expert. And yes, ‘toy expert’ is an actual profession. Really. 

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Laurie has made frequent author appearances in and around the greater New York area as well as at ALA and BEA events in New York and New Orleans. She lived in Orlando, Florida for a year where she and her husband spent all of their spare time and money visiting theme parks before moving to the Cotswolds in England for six months, which was every bit as cool as that sounds. The Cromptons are now back in New York where their two children resent never going to Disney.

 

Laurie occasionally enjoys hanging out in fields of blooming flowers

and also refering to herself in the third person.