Shawn Lawrence Otto is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist and science advocate who wrote and coproduced the movie House of Sand and Fog, which was nominated for three Academy Awards. Sins of Our Fathers, a literary crime novel, is his first novel. It earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Otto is also the producer of the US Presidential Science Debates between Barack Obama and his opponents Mitt Romney and John McCain, and author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, which won the Minnesota Book Award.