Laura Muntz Derr is a retired teacher and marketing professional living in East Tennessee. She taught college English for fifteen years in Virginia, Texas, and Iowa. While raising a family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she and her husband owned and operated a marketing research business. She participated in a 1980s community oral history project that recorded and transcribed nearly a hundred interviews. These interviews are the basis for A Great Cloud of Witnesses. She is the author of Nick and Viola: A Kentucky Family Tragedy in the Tobacco Wars (1904-1911). Derr is a member of the Author's Guild of Tennessee.