Laura Pappano, an award-winning journalist and author, has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Hechinger Report. She is a writer-in-residence at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College and was the 2018-2019 Poynter Fellow-in-Residence at Yale.
Laura is founder of The New Haven Student Journalism Project, operated through Yale University’s Office of New Haven Affairs. Through the program, New Haven Public School students in grades 3-8 work with Yale mentors to cover the most pressing issues of the day and produce The East Rock Record, which is published in print and online at eastrockrecord.org.
Laura is a moderator, speaker and media guest. She has lead keynotes, including at SXSW.edu, and speaks frequently about education and gender issues. She has been a TV and radio guest, including on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR.
She is a former education columnist for The Boston Globe and contributor to the Harvard Education Letter. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. Her story, “How Big Time Sports Ate College Life,” published in The New York Times, is included in The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition (8th and 9th editions, 2013; 9th edition, 2017). She is author or co-author of Inside School Turnarounds (2010), Playing With the Boys (2008) and The Connection Gap (2001).
Her new book, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education will be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.
A 1984 Yale grad, Laura was goalkeeper for the 1980 Ivy League Championship Field Hockey team. She serves on the board of the Yale Field Hockey Association, is a past board chair of Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT and of the West Suburban YMCA in Newton, MA. She bikes, plays USTA tennis, is a passionate theatre-goer, reader and cook.