How a World War II Bomber Pilot Became ‘the King of Artificial Trees’ – The New York Times
So honored to work on this story. My first byline in the New York Times. I’m grateful it has been selected as a Great Read and will be the cover of the Metro section this Sunday.
Read the article on NYTimes.com
I am thrilled to be joining NYU as an Adjunct Professor teaching feature writing. I start in spring and look forward to meeting my first students.
I recently appeared on WBAI 99.5 FM New York to talk about Dorothy Parker with Malachy McCourt and John McDonagh.
The interview starts around 19:30 mark – and goes a good while (40 minutes) so grab a cup of coffee. I love hearing Malachy talk and he knew Dorothy! Time goes quickly when Malachy tells stories!
We also talk about Frank, and Malalchy’s own Algonquinish group of wits, The First Fridays club (Frank and Pete Hamill were in that too), and Malalachy’s gold smuggling days in India. Etc…!
I got this announcement today from popular historian Jack El-Hai who has a fascinating site, el-hai.com, that focuses on popular history and often links to interesting articles.
Announcing the Winner of the 2021 Damn History Article Award
Last year, I grew frustrated by the scarcity of recognition for writers creatively telling nonfiction history stories for non-academic and non-scholarly readers. So I started the Damn History Article Award to honor an engagingly conceived, thoroughly researched, and superbly written popular-history article published during the previous year. Between March and May 2021, a competitive group of submissions poured in, and a judging team made up of Tim Brady, Anika Fajardo, and Pamela Toler went through them. The judges deliberated and decided on a winner and two recipients of honorable mentions.
The winner of the 2021 Damn History Article Award: “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” by Laurie Gwen Shapiro, published in The New Yorker, September 4, 2020.
The judges’ comments: “Laurie Gwen Shapiro takes a curious lead and develops it into a rich story with an unexpectedly poignant conclusion. It was like reading one of those long footnotes that becomes more interesting than the book itself.”
Congratulations to Laurie, who receives a $250 gift card from bookshop.org and a genuine certificate of excellence from Damn History.
I’m here to talk about Armenia in Bed-Stuy, by way of a guy who once chatted up Prince in Minneapolis.
Which is, of course, so New York.
Two Saturdays ago, I was hot and thirsty and hungry in Brooklyn. I was there to look at pretty historic architecture on Hancock Street, and the architecture was nice, but it’s hard to concentrate on Romanesque Revival when you’re dying for a mushroom calzone…
Read the full story at Untapped Cities
Honored to be named the 2021 Winner of Best Essay Or Article from the GANYC Apple Awards for my New Yorker essay The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.
May 15, 2021 at 11:30am
What can biographers who work in different media learn from one another—and teach the rest of us? Join a documentary filmmaker, a print biographer, and a graphic biographer as they explore how they addressed the same fascinating subject, the “Queen of Crime,” Agatha Christie.
Moderator
Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The Daily Beast, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Slate. The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica was her best-selling first full-length work of nonfiction, and was an Indie next selection in 2018. She has also won an Independent Spirit Award as a documentary director. Her 2020 New Yorker article on sneaking Dorothy Parker back to New York City was recently nominated for best NYC essay or article by GANYC’s Apple Awards. Shapiro’s next nonfiction book will be Amelia and George, about Amelia Earhart’s decade-long marriage.
Panelists
Laura Thompson is the award-winning author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award in 2019 and is the first Christie biography to have been written with access to all her letters and papers. Thompson is also the author of the 2016 New York Times best seller The Six, a group biography of the Mitford sisters, and of the true-crime A Tale of Two Murders. Her memoir of her grandmother, The Last Landlady, a three-time book of the year in the U.K., was released in the U.S. in 2020.
Matt Cottingham has 20 years of experience making documentaries for prime-time British television. From traveling the globe to meet the world’s most advanced robots to filming polar bears in the Arctic, Cottingham has directed dozens of history, science, and arts programs for the BBC, ITV, Channel 5, and international broadcasters. Cottingham began his career working on the BBC’s flagship current-affairs program Panorama, interviewing members of Al Qaeda. His passion to understand what makes humans tick continues with his most recent documentary, Inside the Mind of Agatha Christie.
Editor at French crime publisher Éditions du Masque for more than 10 years, Anne Martinetti is a specialist in the worlds of Anglophone cinema and literature. A contributor to the definitive edition of Agatha Christie’s works, she wrote a worldwide best-selling cookbook based on Christie’s novels, entitled Creams and Punishments, as well as a documentary about Christie’s adaptations in movies, The Inheritance Crime, for Canal+. She is co-author of the graphic biography Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie. Martinetti is also the author of a literary guide to London and more than a dozen other works—novels, cookbooks, and essays.
Online January 17, 2021 at 7pm
“On Sunday, January 17 at 7 pm, play pretend “let’s meet at KGB” to raise a little money to keep KGB going. Click below to register, throw $10 to one of the greatest, long-running literary venues in the city that gives a stage to writers just starting out and often to my writer heroes. Get your cocktail or mocktail ready and join three of the most fascinating writers I know: Ada Calhoun, Laurie Gwen Shapiro and Darcey Steinke on zoom for some brief readings on Beginnings in Real Life, then conversation and your questions. Ada will be reading from her recent beloved bestseller, Darcey from the book Maggie Nelson called an “instant classic,” Laurie is going to give us a glimpse of her upcoming, highly anticipated nonfiction book about Amelia Earhart and I’m going to read a bit about the scary days leading to an inauguration…in 1861. Please join us! Talk, joke around and imagine we are in that glorious space up the staircase at KGB.” – Biz Mitchell
Excited and honored to be nominated for best NYC essay or article. I’m up against Jerry Seinfeld! Congrats to all the nominees.
I did a 30-minute radio interview on WFUV Public Radio – (WFUV’S CITYSCAPE) – hope you’ll listen on a coffee break. 
I was joined by Kevin Fitzpatrick of The Dorothy Parker Society. (And host George Bodarky) It was so fun to tell this tangled tale together.
More than 53 years after her death, Dorothy Parker’s ashes were interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
It’s a tale only our guests on this week’s Cityscape could tell well. Kevin C. Fitzpatrick is the head of the Dorothy Parker Society. He’s also a professional tour guide and author. He along with The New Yorker Writer, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, brought Parker’s cremains to the Bronx from Baltimore, where they had been interred at NAACP headquarters. It’s quite the story!