Laurie Scott-Reyes Laurie was born into a U.S. Army family in Frankfurt, Germany. She spent most of her childhood on her grandparents' Alabama farm in Crawford, the western rural fringe of Phenix City, but moved with her family to Indianapolis during her junior year in high school. She attended Crispus Attucks High School where she learned the crafts of sewing and fashion design. After graduation she worked as an alterations tailor in a clothing store for men in Indianapolis and eventually moved to Atlanta where she attended the Art Institute of Atlanta and majored in fashion design while working part-time as a model, and department store demonstrator of a curious new invention called the microwave oven.
Disenchanted with the fashion industry, Laurie longed for a more meaningful vocation. She quit the institute during her final semester and joined the U.S. Army as a photojournalist and illustrator.
Over a twenty-two year span, she was stationed at Fort Hamilton, N.Y; the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hi; Fort Eustis and Fort Belvoir, Va., the Pentagon, the 193rd Infantry Division and the Southern Command, both in the Republic of Panama; Fort Sill, Okl.; and Fort McPherson, Ga. During a two-year break from journalism, she spent two years working as an Army intelligence writer and analyst for the U.S. Embassy in Managua, Nicaragua. Journalism assignments took her to Korea, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, Belize and El Salvador during the civil war there.
In 1997 she was promoted to the Army's highest enlisted rank of sergeant major and subsequently attended the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy in El Paso, Texas where she was among twenty-nine women in a class of 460 soldiers. There she met and married Sergeant Major Israel Reyes-Rodriguez of La Perla in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Both graduated in the top 10 percent of their class.
Laurie retired at Fort McPherson, Ga. in June 2000. She has since worked as a College English instructor, tutor, and fitness instructor.
She is a self-taught artist in oils, acrylics, macrame jewelry, gourd art, and furniture-making. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing degree from Vermont College, Montpelier, Vermont. She is currently an independent writer and artist and student at Harvard Extension School where she is working on a second masters degree and Ph.D in English.