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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Fourteen students and three staff members were killed in the rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day in 2018. Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty last year to first-degree murder. -
A torn hamstring left sprinter Derek Redmond painfully limping through the last 200 meters at the 1992 Summer Olympics. Then his father Jim emerged to help him cross the finish line, together. -
A new investigative report details sexual misconduct and verbal abuse by coaches in the league – and a lack of action by those in charge to address problems, despite years of players' complaints. -
The gatherings are an echo of the protests that have erupted in Iran since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by the country's so-called morality police. -
At an old-school amusement park in Rehoboth Beach, Del., called Funland, a generation of thrillseekers who grew up screaming in the park's Haunted Mansion now brings their kids to do the same. -
The U.S., Canada and Mexico will host the first-ever 48-team World Cup. Sixty of the matches will be played at stadiums across the U.S. -
A few yards from the central memorial for the shooting victims, a clown hands out snow cones and toys for free to all. She says it's her way to give back — and she wants the gun violence to stop. -
The massacre in Uvalde, Texas, was yet another grim reminder that in the U.S., children are more likely to die from gun violence than in any other wealthy nation. And it's getting worse. -
Grocery stores provide healthy foods, create jobs and offer a place for community connection. "We started calling them front-line and essential workers for a reason," says one food access advocate. -
After months of fighting and shelling, Ukraine has ended its combat mission in Mariupol, and its remaining soldiers have been evacuated to Russian-held territory.