Lara Waas is a fiction writer based in New York City, where she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine and others, and she is the recipient of the 2023 Story.One Book Award in the category “A New Generation of Books.” Lara teaches creative writing through Columbia Community Classes and the Incarcerated Writers Initiative. She serves as Assistant Fiction Editor at Narrative Magazine.

Before moving to New York, Lara earned her BA in Comparative Literature at the University of Munich in Germany, where she later taught undergraduate classes and worked as a research fellow. She also spent a few months in Guatemala teaching English, enjoys traveling (and travel writing), and knows the names of all the bodega cats in her neighborhood—Mittens, Clover, and Ashtray, among others.