For although she now has a steady and rewarding job as the editor of Spare Change, Larson has also faced homelessness and missed opportunities.
Larson received a Master of Arts from Johns Hopkins University and had become a newspaper feature writer in Mississippi when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
From 1972 to 1993 she battled her illness. But she says she could not hold her life together.
"I would get a job, a boyfriend, a car and then I would lose all those things when I got sick, and my parents would have to take care of me," she remembers.
In 1985, Larson moved from her home in Mississippi to Boston in search of better medical care. She was homeless for two months at one point and for four months another time.
Like Dougherty, Larson encountered Spare Change purely by chance.
In 1993, she saw a copy of the paper and says she was drawn to it. Her first published piece was a review of Malcolm X, and she has been writing ever since.
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