Lea Carpenter is a novelist and screenwriter. Her first two books - Eleven Days and red white blue (Knopf 2013; Knopf 2018) were critically acclaimed. Her first screenplay, mile 22, about CIA’s Special Activities Division, was directed by Peter Berg and starred John Malkovich and Mark Wahlberg.
In January 2021, she will teach a new class at Columbia Law School, Truth And Story In the Language Of Justice, which she designed with a former federal prosecutor from the SDNY.
Carpenter spent ten years as an editor in literary publishing. She co-founded Francis Ford Coppola’s National Magazine Award-winning literary magazine, Zoetrope, and served as Deputy Publisher for The Paris Review.
Carpenter graduated summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton with an AB in English and has an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School where she was valedictorian.
She has volunteered in various leadership roles at the New York Public Library for over twenty years, where she co-founded the Young Lions.
A Delaware native, Carpenter wrote speeches for the former Delaware Attorney General, Beau Biden, having spent summers working in the Washington, D.C. office of then-Senator now-President Joe Biden.