Laurel M. Sturt

Born on the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, Laurel M. Sturt has never known a moment when she wasn't outraged by injustice. As such, the ongoing situation of Haves and Have-Nots--the contrast never starker than in recent years, with the chasm yawning ever wider--is one that keeps her up at night. Laurel grew up in developing countries and was exposed to poverty from an early age, thanks to her labor economist father; later, family slideshows of vacations featured as many scenes of migrant workers as family members, as her father collaborated with United Farm Workers organizer Cesar Chavez on various projects.

A visual artist as well as writer, Laurel attended the Madeira School and Vassar College, where she majored in Political Science and Art History. Through high school, college and after she volunteered at orphanages and tutored disadvantaged kids, and while in her twenties married and became mother to three small stepchildren. While writing for television she fell into fashion design and earned a degree in design and illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a career she pursued with labels such as Ralph Lauren, as well as her own. Ultimately unfulfilled, though, in 2002 she decided to focus on her passion for social justice, joining the New York City Teaching Fellows to become a teacher in a high-poverty elementary school in the Bronx. Concurrently she received her master's degree in Education from the City College of New York.

Infuriated by what she experienced as an inner city teacher and the inauthentic education she was charged with providing, Laurel decided to write an expose of the New York City public school system, in the framework of the destructive local micromanagement by Mayor Michael Bloomberg along with the disastrous federal mandates of Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's Race to the Top. The result is her first book, Davonte's Inferno: Ten Years in the New York Public School Gulag.

Laurel currently lives in Manhattan with her son, Raven. An erstwhile activist, when not losing her voice at protests defending justice for people and the planet, she can be found in exotic locales around the world, enjoying her other great passion, travel. Meanwhile, ever exploring a different facet of her personality, she's writing her second book, a chick lit memoir/adventure. This fits in well with the M.O. of Laurel's life, with props to Monty Python: And Now For Something Completely Different.