About Laurel

Laurel Hennen Vigil is a fourth-generation Californian, with Nuevomexicano roots in New Mexico and southern Colorado. Her film-buff family raised her with a love of Old Hollywood, film noir, and all things California, which—along with her heritage and family history—inspired her debut novel, Hollywood Nocturno.

She graduated from Vassar College, where she studied sociology and creative writing, was an editor at the college newspaper, and won Vassar’s Jane Dealy and Woodrow Wirsig Award for Excellence and Promise in Journalism. Her freelance writing has appeared in publications including Ms. Magazine, Oakland Magazine, and the East Bay Express, among others. She worked on Reveal’s investigative crime podcast “Mississippi Goddam,” which was a finalist for a Peabody Award, and won an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

When she’s not backpacking around the world solo and chronicling her adventures on her blog, Kicking Through Continents, Laurel lives in Oakland, California, in a house full of rescue cats.