Scott W. Stern

I am a scholar and public interest lawyer. My first nonfiction book, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women (Beacon Press, 2018), was a New York Times editor’s choice selection, a Boston Globe best book of the year, and has been optioned for feature film by an Oscar-winning producer. My second nonfiction book, There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials that Sustained Jim Crow—and the People who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2024. My third, Of Margaret: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Warrior Queen (co-written with Charles O'Malley) is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2025.

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My popular writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Time Magazine, Jacobin, Teen Vogue, Boston Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly, among other places. My scholarly writing has appeared in almost a dozen journals.

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An avid origami folder, I have written two other books: Outside the Box Origami: A New Generation of Extraordinary Folds (Tuttle Publishing, 2011) and Fabrigami: The Origami Art of Folding Cloth to Create Decorative and Useful Objects, with Jill Stovall and Florence Temko (Tuttle Publishing, 2013).

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A proud product of Pittsburgh, I am a graduate of Yale University, with a bachelors and masters in American Studies, summa cum laude, and Yale Law School, where I was an editor on the Yale Law Journal. I am currently an associate attorney at Earthjustice. I was previously a legal fellow at Greenpeace International and a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

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I am represented by Susan Lee Cohen at Riverside Literary Agency.