Gregory Laski is a journalist, scholar, and writer focusing on culture and civic life in the United States, past and present. His reported features, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and PublicSource, among other outlets. His story about what August Wilson’s last play meant to the Pittsburgh neighborhood where it’s set was a finalist for a 2025 Golden Quill Award given by the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania.
Laski is the author of the book Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the American Literature Association’s Pauline E. Hopkins Society Scholarship Award, and co-editor of Democracies in America (Oxford University Press, 2023), a book of key terms for civic dialogue.
He is currently working on a narrative nonfiction book that explains why the stories that Americans told about revenge after the Civil War matter for ideas about racial justice today. An essay-length portion of this project was published in American Literature in December 2019 and was honored with two national prizes: the 1921 Prize, awarded by the American Literature Society, and the Norman Foerster Prize, given to the best essay published annually in American Literature. This research has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Newberry Library Longterm Fellowship.
Laski holds a BA in English and Spanish from the University of Notre Dame and PhD in English from Northwestern University. He has more than a decade of experience as a teacher and has won multiple awards for his work in the classroom.
Originally from Pittsburgh, he divides his time between western Pennsylvania and southern Colorado. Contact him here. Subscribe to his Substack here.
GREGORY LASKI 