Laura Sessions Stepp is a journalist specializing in the coverage of teenagers and the adolescent years for the Style Section of the Washington Post. Ms. Stepp has written about children and families for more than a decade, and her work has appeared in such publications as Parent, Child, Working Mother, Reader's Digest and Nieman Reports of Harvard University.

Ms. Stepp served as a member of the U.S. Surgeon General's Healthy People 2000 Panel on Adolescence in 1998 and 1999 and chairs the board of advisors of the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families at the University of Maryland. She authored Our Last Best Shot: Guiding Our Children Through Early Adolescence, which will be released in June and has already been highly acclaimed by experts in the field.