About

Contact Information:

email Laura(@)Lantoniou(dot)com

The Advocate: “ Laura Antoniou (is) an underground legend (and) a leather pioneer: she edited the groundbreaking Leatherwomen anthologies, penned scholarly work on BDSM, won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Leather Association (in 2011), and is now a well known speaker and teacher on kinky sex communities. Her work (over 600,000 books sold and counting) has been translated into Spanish, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.” (from “We Were Kinky Long Before 50 Shades of Gray,” published May 2013)

Michael Rowe (Writing Below the Belt): “Queens-born Laura Antoniou is heiress presumptive to some of the erotic territory staked out by Pat Califia and John Preston… (Her) writing moves with assurance between genders and sexual orientations, relentlessly exploring the dark side of sexuality.”

Sassafras Lowery (Roving Pack, Lost Boi): “Since the 1980s when Laura Antoniou edited the groundbreaking Leatherwomen anthologies, she has been considered a leader in Lesbian BDSM erotic writing and BDSM writing in general. “

The Marketplace series describes “an elite and secretive world organization, dedicated to the auctioning and overseeing of the world’s finest lifestyle slaves… a world so vivid in sequel after sequel, it takes on a reality of its own, one that’s visually hard to let go of once the reader has put down the book.” (Libido Magazine). The sixth book in the series, The Inheritor, is new for 2015, and Laura plans several more in the series.

In 2013, Laura published her first mystery, The Killer Wore Leather, a murder mystery that takes place at a leather contest. It won the 2013 Rainbow Book Award for Best B/T & LGBT Contemporary & Historical Fiction, and the NLA Pauline Reage Novelist Award in 2014.

Laura began her writing career in the 1980′s, and edited the groundbreaking “Leatherwomen” anthologies, as well as several other collections of BDSM and erotic fiction and non-fiction in the pre-internet era. Laura was also a columnist for Girlfriends magazine from 1995-1997, the submissions editor for Badboy and Bi-Curious magazines from 1995-96, and a regular contributor to The SandMUtopia Guardian from 1993-2000. Her most recent anthologies are Best Lesbian Erotica 2015 (Cleis)  and, coming soon, No Safewords !!, the second collection of Marketplace fan fiction. In addition, she is the co-author (with her wife, Karen) of a ritually correct Leather Passover Haggadah, Avadim Chayinu, and will be leading a seder at the 2015 International Ms Leather Contest Weekend.

As a presenter, panelist, and keynote speaker, Laura has appeared at over 150 conferences, groups and events over more than twenty years, both entertaining and delivering an occasional verbal indictment. She has also appeared at colleges and universities, including Harvard, NYU, Rutgers, Columbia and the University of Washington.

Laura lives in Queens, NY with her wife Karen, and is Kim Attica’s boy. In 2011, Laura received the NLA: International’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. And she’s still alive! She is also the recipient of the 2011 “Worst Camper” award at Dark Odyssey:Fusion, and yes, she totally deserved both of these awards.