Laura Shaine Cunningham leads a diversified life as an author, playwright and journalist. She is the author of nine published books, including the acclaimed Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country; both memoirs first appeared in The New Yorker magazine and were excerpted in The New York Times and the London Times. A Place in the Country was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Newsday, and literary quarterlies.

She is the winner of many awards, including four N.E.A. and NYFA Fellowships, two each in the categories of literature and theatre. She frequently speaks on Memoir Writing, Fiction writing, Play writing and has held workshops at Omega, Mohonk Mountain House, SUNY New Paltz, the Woodstock Writers Festival, Harvard, and N.Y.U.

Sleeping Arrangements, her childhood memoir of being raised by her two bachelor uncles became a modern classic and garnered rave reviews. Praised by Harper Lee, Anne Tyler, Muriel Spark and many other authors, the New York Times hailed Sleeping Arrangements as “A Model Memoir—irreverent and generous.”