Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, New York, The Daily Beast, Slate, and other publications. She is the author of The Stowaway (Simon & Schuster, 2018), a bestseller and Indie Next selection, and The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon (Viking, 2025), named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Amazon, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Post, and HISTORY.com. Her New Yorker piece “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” won the Damn History Award in 2021. She also received the gold medallion in People Profiles from the Silurian Press Club for her New York Times profile of World War II pilot Si Spiegel. She is an adjunct professor in the graduate program at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she teaches feature writing.