Lauren was born in New York City and raised in Southern California. She received a BFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in painting from San Francisco State University. In 2008, she completed the program in fiction at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Nimrod International, The Bellevue Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Northwest Review of Books, Catapult, The Millions, and others. In 2017, her story, "An Amount of Discretion," which appeared in The Southern Review (Winter 2017), was selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. She is a recipient of a 2022 First Pages Prize from the de Groot Foundation, an Honorable Mention in Zoetrope: All-Story’s 2022 Short Fiction Competition, the Bellevue Literary Review's Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and an essay published in Zyzzyva, “Eldorado,” was cited as Notable in Best American Essays. Her column at Catapult Magazine, Invisible History, can be found here, and a 2017 Catapult essay, “Arab Past, American Present,” is included in the anthology, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home, edited by Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary (Catapult 2020). Some of the above work can be read in part or in full, here. Recent publications include memoirs on art and family in World Literature Today, and her essays for Alta Journal’s California Book Club can be found here. She is at work on a novel.
Lauren is a contributing editor for the museum of americana, an online literary review, and serves on the board of WTAW Press, a nonprofit independent publisher. Recent news and events are listed here.
