Laurel Wamsley
Laurel Wamsley is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She reports breaking news for NPR's digital coverage, newscasts, and news magazines, as well as occasional features. She was also the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France.
Wamsley got her start at NPR as an intern for Weekend Edition Saturday in January 2007 and stayed on as a production assistant for NPR's flagship news programs, before joining the Washington Desk for the 2008 election.
She then left NPR, doing freelance writing and editing in Austin, Texas, and then working in various marketing roles for technology companies in Austin and Chicago.
In November 2015, Wamsley returned to NPR as an associate producer for the National Desk, where she covered stories including Hurricane Matthew in coastal Georgia. She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including climate change, possibilities for social networks beyond Facebook, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and joke theft.
In 2010, Wamsley was a Journalism and Women Symposium Fellow and participated in the German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, and was a 2016 Voqal Foundation Fellow. She will spend two months reporting from Germany as a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists.
Wamsley earned a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Wamsley holds a master's degree from Ohio University, where she was a Public Media Fellow and worked at NPR Member station WOUB. A native of Athens, Ohio, she now lives and bikes in Washington, DC.
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Lucio is scheduled to be executed for the death of her 2-year-old daughter. Her supporters say she was forced into a false "confession" and that new evidence exists that proves her innocence. -
The Biden administration is moving to end sweeping pandemic border restrictions known as Title 42 on May 23. The controversial public health order was used to quickly expel migrants at the border.
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"We see a really clear association between how these maps were drawn in the '30s and the air pollution disparities today," says an author of a study on the effects of the discriminatory policy.
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An expedition went where few have ever gone to locate the remnants of a ship that became trapped in the ice 106 years ago, dashing the famed explorer's ambitious mission to cross Antarctica.
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Astronauts hammered collection tubes into the lunar surface on the last Apollo mission to the moon. Now a sample is being carefully pierced open — to be analyzed by today's latest tech.
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As the idea spread, more than 61,000 nights were booked, grossing nearly $2 million. One host in Kyiv says the donations have helped pay staffers who have fled and buy food for elderly neighbors.
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More than a dozen historically Black colleges received bomb threats on Tuesday, the first day of Black History Month, following a number of bomb threats at HBCUs on Monday. Several went on lockdown.
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The deadly fire in a Bronx high-rise earlier this month has cast attention on fire safety requirements for apartment buildings. Seventeen residents died from smoke inhalation.
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After the deadly fire in a Bronx apartment building, hundreds of people are living in hotel rooms. But finding housing in another affordable building like Twin Parks may not be easy.
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Fast-rising home prices are creating opportunities for some longtime Black homeowners. Those high valuations can also raise big questions about the best way to tap into that wealth.
