Laura stumbled into journalism quite unintentionally, while she was living in Cairo, Egypt after college. Four years later, she was the New York Times correspondent in Yemen covering the biggest story of the year: the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Laura’s book, Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen (Arcade 2014) is an account of that experience.

In addition to Cairo and Sanaa, Laura has lived in Berlin and Tbilisi. She has had the privilege of reporting in a dozen countries across the Middle East, East Africa and Europe.

In recent years, Laura has turned from breaking news to investigative, feature journalism. Her reporting has focused on forced migration, religion and how US policy impacts people around the world. Her story for the Virginia Quarterly Review that followed a Syrian refugee family in Berlin received a citation from the Overseas Press Club for best magazine reporting in print or digital on an international story in 2018.

Laura’s reporting also has appeared in Slate, Foreign Policy, Harper’s, Vice, the Atlantic, Guernica and many more publications. Her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the International Women’s Media Foundation. She has spoken about Yemen at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Atlantic Council and Chatham House.

Laura speaks a mixture of Yemeni and Egyptian Arabic. It’s intelligible on a good day.

She’s also dabbled in the art of the essay and is represented by Regal Hoffman and Associates.

Laura lives in a small town in Appalachia, not so far from Washington.

Email: kasinof [at] gmail [dot] com