Laura Kasinof is a writer and journalist. She has had the privilege of reporting in a dozen countries across the Middle East, East Africa and Europe. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, Harper’s, the Guardian, the Atlantic, VQR, Guernica and many more publications. It’s been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the International Women’s Media Foundation, and has been translated for Italian, Swiss and Japanese press. 

Laura’s story for the Virginia Quarterly Review that chronicled the saga of a newly arrived Syrian refugee family in Berlin received a citation from the Overseas Press Club for best magazine reporting on an international story in 2018.

Laura is currently at work on her second book, a biography of former Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh, forthcoming from Reaktion. 

Her first book is about her experience as the New York Times correspondent in Yemen during the Arab Spring. PRI’s The World named Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen as a top book of 2014 and Kirkus Reviews called it “a moving portrait of life as a war correspondent.” 

Laura speaks a strange mixture of Yemeni and Egyptian Arabic, as well as taxi-driver-conversational Georgian.  

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

After living in Cairo, Sanaa, Tbilisi and Berlin, Laura now lives in a small town in Appalachia, not so far from Washington.  

Email: kasinof [at] gmail [dot] com