Laura Silver

Laura Silver is a native New Yorker and an award-winning journalist whose writing on food and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Forward, the Jerusalem Report and on NPR.

Laura has been a writer in residence at the Millay Colony, the Banff Centre and the New York Public Library’s Wertheim Study. She has received fellowships from the Lilly Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York Times Company Foundation and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, among others. She has delivered talks at international venues including the American Museum of Natural History, the Krakow Jewish Festival and TEDx.

In 2013, Laura was named the Barach Nonfiction Teaching Fellow at Wesleyan University’s Writers Conference. Laura has been profiled in Haaretz and quoted by international news outlets including Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Gazeta Wyborcza (Warsaw) and The Jewish Chronicle (London). Al-Jazeera America featured her in a segment about the knish crisis of 2013.

Laura earned an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College (where she studied with Allan Ginsburg), a B.A. in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst/ She has worked as an outreach worker to homeless people on the streets of New York, a United Nations tour guide and a sports correspondent at the Paralympic Games in Sydney, Australia. Laura has been on staff at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and UJA-Federation of New York and has taught writing at the City University of New York, the University of Virginia and in New York City public schools.

Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, out from Brandeis University Press on May 6, 2014, is Laura’s first book. In addition, she teaches “Jewish Food Through Song and Film” in the Department of Food Studies at the New School and is a research associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. She lives in Brooklyn and is considered the world’s leading expert on the knish.