Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her latest book, American Prophecy: One Family, Two Nations, and a World on Fire, will be published by Random House in September. Lauren’s prior book is the bestselling This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, a work of narrative nonfiction about a young homeless mother in New York. It was named a Notable book of 2020 by the New York Times. The book was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize, given by Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which recognizes a book that has “broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.”

This year, Lauren has the honor of serving as the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor at SUNY New Paltz. She’s also at work on a musical called Shelter — co-writing with playwright Kirsten Greenidge and composer Crystal Monee Hall — based on her reporting in a Brooklyn shelter.

Lauren is the author of two previous books, the bestselling One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. Her essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle.  She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk. 

She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Nancy Decker Dougherty Fellow and Calderwood Journalism Fellow at MacDowell, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Moulin a Nef fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, a Loghaven fellow, a fellow at the James Merrill House, and a Brown Foundation resident at the Maison Dora Maar in Menerbes, France. She has led the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, UVA, and Dartmouth, and has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU, where she has also been Visiting Scholar. Lauren is a member of NationSwell Council and the Invisible Institute. Lauren speaks widely at universities, is a frequent commentator for the BBC and has been interviewed nationally and internationally on many networks including CNN, PBS, CBS, NBC, and throughout public radio — her first love.