Coming May 2026 from Sybilline Press
Welcome!
The second most exciting thing in life for me has always been learning something new. The first? Getting to share what I’ve learned with others. My life has given me so many opportunities to do both—as a professor (retired), as a historical novelist, and as a cruise lecturer.
My goal as a historical novelist is to provide you, the reader, with high-quality fiction about women and the forgotten and undervalued roles they played in their societies. Whether it’s the real-life physicist Emilie du Chatelet, the literary heroine Penelope, or women who have sprung entirely from my imagination, I offer you stories true to the facts of a time and place, to bring history alive for you and make you feel as much a part of other cultures as you do your own.
As a world-wide lecturer for several cruise lines, I use my career as a college professor of humanities to find the stories that make travel more exciting and memorable.
If you have either met me recently or been in my life since I was a teenager (or younger), you may know me by my birth name, Laurel Weeks. I have been using this name in my private life for several years.
Please check back from time to time for updates on my new projects and schedule, and drop me a line at laurelcoronabooks@gmail.com to let me know you’re out there reading and traveling!
From my diary
- Ready, Set, GoAs usual, I can forget I have a blog for months at a time. Like everyone else I know, I get so busy I would forget to breathe if that were possible. My last few months have been taken up with the work of getting lectures in place for a couple of months of cruise assignments. I’ve lost count now of how many I have prepared this time, but my guess is it’s over 40, and I’ve been working on it since April. There’s a look people get sometimes on the ship and I know what they’re thinking, that they…
- The Photo Not TakenPeople say the honesty in my writing has been helpful to them or someone they have shared it with. I am pleased and a little surprised by this because in many respects my writing has been far more self-protective than revelatory. But I have reached a stage where I think I am strong enough to risk a little more. Part of this new strength comes from being old enough to give far less of a damn what people think of me, but it is combined now with a realization that for the first time—maybe ever, when I think about it—I don’t…
- Liquid TimePeople often ask me if, after thirteen years of cruise lecturing, there is any place I haven’t been, and I always answer the same way: Inland. It is true by now that except for Japan, Antarctica, and parts of Africa there are very few cruise ports I haven’t been to at least once. Cruising has been a wonderful way to touch down around the world, but when you just spend one port day in a place, and your experiences are curated around what a country wants you to see, I always feel I have brushed up against a place but…