About the Author

Hannah Lauritzen  Journalism student at the University of North Texas 
I was born and raised in Houston Texas. My mom comes from an Italian family that boasts dark skin and curly black hair. When she held me for the first time, she yelled in shock asking why I was blonde. I was only just born, and already, I was the misfit.  From then on, being the odd one out became something I embraced.

As a child I was rambunctious, never to be seen with my tongue inside my mouth like other polite toddler girls.  As soon as I learned to crawl, I learned to climb. I climbed everything. I remember my mom once calling the police because I went missing. Really, I just managed to climb out of my crib and crawl beneath it to take a nap. I have busted my head open twice. Once on a submarine in the Cayman Islands and the other due to a flying remote thrown by my sister.

I had a hunger for adventure. I was always looking for something interesting in the ordinary, a story to tell if you will. In fact, for most of my childhood, I wanted to be an author. Only later would I realize that I wanted to spend my life telling other peoples’ stories rather my own.

I tried sports. I danced competitively, I was on the swim team, I played soccer. None of these hobbies really suited me. I was decent at them, but I wasn’t happy. I wanted to write. I wanted to make something. I wanted to do something that mattered.

In high school I joined the yearbook staff. My sister was the Editor-In-Chief at the time and I didn’t want to copy anything that she did, but after one of my teachers urged me to join, I caved.  The first time I entered the journalism suite, everything fell into place. I was home.  I wrote stories, I took photographs, and years later when I became the Editor-In-Chief, I designed my own 450 page yearbook. I loved it all. Soon I found myself following my sister’s footsteps a lot more closely than I’d ever admit. I came to UNT to join the Mayborn School of Journalism as she was preparing to graduate from it on a full ride scholarship. She graduated, but has since decided that journalism is not for her. She wants to teach Kindergarten. I remember her telling me at the time that I was one who was meant to be a journalist.

These days I work for the North Texas Daily as the Editor-in-chief. I’m currently a senior journalism major with a focus in print/digital news and a minor in political science. In the future I want to either travel as a freelance reporter or work for a magazine, writing, photographing, and designing my own work. I aim to be as versatile as possible and want to write stories and present them in new and innovative ways to readers.

Besides my older sister, I also have a 15-year-old brother. He’s a trouble-maker with a big attitude problem, but a good heart. I expect great things from him. He lives at home in Houston with my Dad, step-mom and their cross-eyed dog named Finn. My sister and her dog Evie just recently moved back into my Mom’s house, which is located down the street. I also have two step-brothers and two step-sisters, many step-dogs and one step-cat who I personally do not care for. On Thanksgiving, my step-sister Sara gave birth to my adorable little nephew Kai. He doesn’t do much, other than lay around in a tree frog position, but he’s cute and still has that fresh “new baby smell.”

In my free time, I enjoy reading in the park, driving around with my friends in search of cool new spots to explore, wasting vast amounts of time playing the Sims 4 and looking at the Denton Animal Shelter’s PetFinder website while I weep, because I want to adopt all of the dogs. I’ve watched the movie Almost Famous at least 30 times, and only just found out that Jason Lee, who now lives in Denton, played the lead singer of the band the movie follows. My favorite author is Chuck Palahniuk, and my personalized signed copy of “Rant” is the prized jewel of my bookshelf.  I love traveling, and this past summer I spent five weeks studying cross-cultural reporting in Japan.

My friends call me driven, my boyfriend calls me “sleepy and kind of mean”, and my parents are just proud that I managed to get through an entire semester without breaking my phone.