Judith Laura was born Judith Laura Levine in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, NY, in 1941, the first of three children, all daughters. Her parents, Ida and Al Levine, were musicians; her father was also an artist. Her grandparents, Bessie and Benjamin Erdberg of Manhattan, and Jennie and Jacob Levine of the Bronx, all immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s from shtetls in “the Pale” of Poland (sometimes Russia).

When Judith was 2, she and her parents moved to Ewing, NJ, a suburb of Trenton. Judith attended Parkway Elementary School and Ewing High School, where she was editor of the student newspaper. When she was 15, she attended her first international folk dance behind the Princeton University graduate school dorm. Folk-dancing became a life-long passion and later she was active for many years in metro Washington DC folk dance circles. 

She received a BS in Journalism from Ohio University in Athens, where her feature articles for the university student newspaper, The Post, won national and state awards. She also became well known on campus for her theater reviews. She became the first feature editor of The Post and later, copy editor. In 1962, she tried for editor-in-chief but was turned down because another female student had held that position the previous year (the first woman editor!), and also because Judith’s politics were considered too radical (she wrote articles against US segregation and South African apartheid for a campus civil rights group’s publication).

Upon learning that Judith had been denied the Post editorship, the college yearbook, the Athena, grabbed her for its copy editor slot. Drinking copious amount of lemonade, Judith wrote the unconventional copy for OU’s 1963 Athena, whose horizontal format broke with vertical tradition. This provided better layout possibilities for an artistic photo-essay, which Judith's prose-poetry accompanied. In retrospect, the yearbook’s unconventional approach can be seen as a foreshadow of student rebellion in the later ‘60s and ‘70s.

After graduation, Judith worked for about a year on the Trenton Times, one of two “first women” hired to work on the news desk of the afternoon daily, where she wrote mostly feature articles and theater and music reviews. In 1964, she joined friends in Denver where, armed with a enthusiastic letter of recommendation from the Trenton editor to his buddy the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, Judith tried to get a job on that paper. She was turned away by the editor’s assistant, who told her the paper wasn’t considering female applicants for reporter positions. Too discouraged to approach other daily papers, Judith got a job as a department store advertising copywriter and hung out with local literati. 

After a few months, Judith left Denver for New York City where she obtained uninteresting and low-paying editorial work after being refused more interesting and lucrative jobs which, as in Denver, required a certain anatomical appendage she lacked and considered a liability certain exquisite labyrinthine anatomy she possessed. In 1965, Judith married Ronald J. Willis, whom she had met in 1963 at a folk dance in Miss Fine’s gym in Princeton. Shortly after the first great NYC blackout, they fled the city during garbage and subway strikes and drove to Washington, DC. They settled in Arlington, Virginia, where Ron Willis founded the International Fortean Organzation (INFO) and Judith became one of the first employees of Public Health Service’s National Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health.

Judith Laura, c. 1978

During the Vietnam era, Judith participated in the alternative media, writing articles for the Washington Free Press, and later becoming book reviewer, book editor, and then editor of Woodwind, an arts paper. During this time she gave birth to a daughter and taught herself astrology and tarot. Ron Willis died of cancer in 1975.