Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her most recent 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.”
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. She is currently reporting and writing a book for Random House about an ideologically divided Southern family as a way to understand our current political climate, called American Prophecy: One Family, Two Nations, and a World on Fire. She’s also been at work on a musical — co-writing with playwright Kirsten Greenidge and composer Crystal Monee Hall — based on her reporting in a Brooklyn shelter, called Shelter in the Promised Land.
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.
Lauren is a member of NationSwell Council and the Invisible Institute. She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Nancy Decker Dougherty Fellow and Calderwood Journalism Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, 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.
In addition to her journalism, Lauren has lead 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. She was a regular commentator for the BBC and has been interviewed nationally and internationally on many networks including CNN, PBS, CBS, NBC, and throughout public radio. Lauren speaks widely at universities, and will be the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor at SUNY New Paltz in fall 2025.