AustLit

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an American writer and filmmaker who lives in New York. Her English teacher was Frank McCourt. Shapiro has written three adult comic novels that had major exposure in the New York Times. One of them, The Unexpected Salami (1998), reflects her experience of visiting Australia and living in Melbourne in the 1990s. Her first play, 'Inventing Color', premiered at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Shapiro co-directed the 2001 theatrical documentary about octagenarian New Yorker Tobias Schneebaum, Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale with her brother David Shapiro. It received over ten major awards and is one of the highest grossing documentary films.

(Source: 'Tales of the Unexpected', The Melbourne Herald - Sun (26.12.1998): 17).