Lauren Kessler is an American author, and immersion journalist who specializes in narrative nonfiction.
She teaches storytelling for social change at the University of Washington and for the Forum of Journalism and Media in Vienna.
Kessler is the author of eleven works of narrative nonfiction including 2023 Oregon Book Award-winner, Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home" (Sourcebooks, 2022), A Grip of Time: When prison is your life (Red Lightning Books, 2019), Raising the Barre: Big Dreams, False Starts and My Midlife Quest to Dance The Nutcracker (Da Capo Press, 2015); Counterclockwise: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-Aging (Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, Pennsylvania, 2013); and My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, A Daughter, A Journey Through the Thicket of Adolescence (Penguin Books, 2011).
Her book, Dancing with Rose (renamed Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's in its paperback edition), won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and was named a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal.
Kessler is also author of Washington Post best-seller Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era, a biography of Elizabeth Bentley,[1][failed verification] and the Los Angeles Times best-seller and Oregon Book Award finalist The Happy Bottom Riding Club, a biography of aviator Florence Pancho Barnes.