About
Shilpi Malinowski is an author, reporter, oral historian, teacher, and D.C. resident.
Her first book, "Shaw, LeDroit Park and Bloomingdale in Washington, D.C.: An Oral History," was published in 2021. The book tells the story of 70 years in D.C.’s most gentrified neighborhood through reporting, oral history, and photography.
Before immersing herself in oral history, Shilpi was a reporter whose articles have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, India Abroad, UrbanTurf, and The Indian American magazine. She often focused on two subject areas: local D.C. communities, and the acculturation of the Indian American diaspora.
In the past, Shilpi has been a high school journalism teacher, a yoga teacher, a photographer, and GRE prep teacher. She has Anthropology and Psychology degrees from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
She is a 2022 and 2023 Fellow with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is currently working on an oral history project about the assimilation of second-generation Indian Americans.
Featured Work
Shaw, LeDroit Park and Bloomingdale in Washington, D.C.: An Oral History
Let residents tell you what it's been like to live in D.C.'s most gentrified neighborhood. When Gretchen Wharton came to Shaw in 1946, the houses were full of families that looked like hers: lower-income, African American, two parents with kids. The sidewalks were full of children playing. When Leroy Thorpe moved in in the 1980s, the same streets were dense with drug markets. When John Lucier found a deal on a house in Shaw in 2002, he found himself moving into one of four occupied homes on his block. Every morning, he waited by himself on the empty platform of the newly opened metro station. When Preetha Iyengar became pregnant with her first child in 2016, she jumped into a seller's market to buy a rowhouse in the area. Journalist and Shaw resident Shilpi Malinowski explores the complexities of the many stories of belonging in the District's most dynamic neighborhood.
