About

Meet Shalene.

Shalene Gupta is a Minnesota-grown St. Louis-based writer with Chinese-Indonesian and Indian roots. She’s currently a staff editor for Fast Company’s Work Life & Leadership section.

She’s the author of The Cycle: Confronting the Pain of Periods and PMDD (Flatiron, 2024). She’s also the co-author of The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It (Public Affairs, 2021). The Power of Trust was nominated for a Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea award. In 2022, Shalene was identified as a thinker to watch out for and made the Thinkers50 Radar list. She hosted the Trustonomy podcast, which was nominated by the Ambies for excellence in podcasting.

In the past she was a reporter for Fortune where she wrote about the intersection of diversity and tech. Her work has appeared in several publications including The Atlantic, ESPN, Harvard Business Review and TIME.

Before working as a reporter, she was a financial specialist for the U.S. Department of Treasury, taught English in Malaysia on a Fulbright scholarship and wrote a book documenting the history of the Malaysian Fulbright program. She has a BA in writing seminars and psychology from Johns Hopkins and an MS from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, and has taught it’s Memoir Incubator program.

Shalene has taught writing classes on the novel and memoir, delivered keynote speeches about trust and diversity, and is always happy to chat.