Carrie La Seur

Carrie La Seur is a seventh generation descendant of homesteaders who came to Montana in 1864 and settled in what is now called the Gallatin Valley, near the headwaters of the Missouri River. “My frontier heritage has always been a taproot and a source of resolve. If they could do it, so can I.” After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, Carrie was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and earned a doctorate in modern languages from Oxford University. “After Oxford, I tried academia for a while and did a summer course at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The literary and academic worlds did not fall at my feet, so I packed up and headed to Yale Law School. The law was a way to get back to Montana and do work I care about. In the process, I gained a perspective and a voice that made my writing stronger and more relevant.” In 2006, she founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states. Carrie and Plains Justice have played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign. Carrie currently practices law on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans, and does a little writing, from an office in Billings, Montana. A licensed private pilot, she hikes, skis, and fishes the Montana wilderness with her family in her spare time. Her work has appeared in such diverse media as Grist, Harvard Law and Policy Review, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and Salon.