Recently shortlisted for The City of Toronto Book Award and named "Toronto’s Best Emerging Author" by NOW magazine, Lauren Kirshner is a novelist, freelance writer and arts educator. Her writing has appeared in publications across Canada including The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, ELLE CANADA, NOW, Taddle Creek, Quill and Quire, The Hart House Review, and Exile.

Lauren's first novel, Where We Have to Go (M&S), which the Globe and Mail called "a very strong original debut," has been translated into Dutch and German and will be published in the US in spring 2012. Her 2008 non-fiction work about the maquiladora workers of Juarez, Mexico, “Twenty Poems about Claudia," was included in the paper documentary I Live Here (Pantheon).

Lauren is a graduate of The University of Toronto’s Masters of English in the Field of Creative Writing, where she was mentored by Margaret Atwood. She’s received a number of awards, including the Arthur Irwin Award for Distinction in Journalism, an Eden Mills Literary Festival Prize, and two Hart House Poetry Awards. In 2010, Where We Have to Go was chosen as novel of the year for “One Book, One Brant."

When she's not writing at her desk, Lauren works extensively as an arts educator in schools and in the community. In 2010, she founded Sister Writes, the first creative writing program in Toronto that gives marginalized women the opportunity to learn skills from professional writers and publish a magazine. Lauren regularly leads one-off workshops for high school students and has designed and delivered programming for many organizations including Harbourfront Center, Luminato Festival of Arts + Creativity, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Kids Can Fly, and Diaspora Dialogues. Lauren is delighted to be serving as the 2011-2012 County of Brant Public Library Writer-in-Residence.

Lauren lives in Toronto and is working on her second novel.