Bestselling author Lauren Sandler will be the fall 2025 Ottaway Visiting Professor of Journalism
SUNY New Paltz is excited to welcome award-winning journalist and author Lauren Sandler to campus as the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism for the fall 2025 semester.
Sandler is a widely published reporter whose essays and features have examined topics including homelessness, parenthood and other divisive subjects in the United States.
As Ottaway Visiting Professor, Sandler will lead an upper-division journalism seminar, “Writing the Argument,” focused on how young reporters can develop the reporting and rhetorical skills to create takes that actually change readers’ perspectives. The seminar will encourage students to engage with the world and with each other in real time, to build the rigor and personal voice needed to write effectively about what matters most.
About Lauren Sandler
Sandler’s work has appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle. She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk.
She is the author of three books, including most recently the bestselling “This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home,” a nonfiction narrative about a young homeless mother in New York.
Sandler is currently reporting and writing a book for Random House about an ideologically divided Southern family, as a lens for understanding broader divisions in contemporary American society. She’s also been at work on a musical — co-writing with playwright Kirsten Greenidge and composer Crystal Monee Hall — based on her reporting in a Brooklyn shelter.
Sandler has also worked extensively as an educator, serving as the lead for the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, UVA, and Dartmouth, and teaching in the graduate journalism program at NYU, where she has also been Visiting Scholar. She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and a Brown Foundation resident at the Maison Dora Maar in Menerbes, France, among many other professional accolades.
More about Lauren Sandler’s work, including links to selected features, can be found here.
About the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professorship
The James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professorship, SUNY New Paltz’s first endowed professorship, is named for the founder of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., James H. Ottaway Sr. (1911-2000), a leader of the American Press Institute and a lifelong supporter of high-quality journalism in the Hudson Valley and across the globe.
The Ottaway Visiting Professorship was established in 2000 through the generosity of James H. Ottaway Jr. ’18 HON and Mary Ottaway ’70g (Elementary Education).
Numerous well-known journalists have preceded Sandler as Ottaway professors, including Pulitzer Prize winners, foreign correspondents, book authors, editors, investigative reporters and experts in finance, science and consumer journalism.
More information about the Ottaway Visiting Professorship, including biographies of previous professors, can be found at newpaltz.edu/ottaway/.