Leslie Schwartz (born 1962) is an American author and teacher of creative writing. She has published two novels, Jumping the Green and Angels Crest, the latter of which was made into a 2011 film, and The Lost Chapters, a memoir of her time in jail while recovering from alcoholism.
Schwartz was born in 1962. [1] She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric and English from UC Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2012 from Pacific University in Oregon. [2] [3] She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. [4] [5]
Schwartz is a recovering alcoholic, who began drinking at the age of 11, and became sober in 2000. [6] In 2012, she relapsed, and spent 414 days in what she calls "a chronic state of blackout" from alcohol and drugs, including two near-fatal overdoses and four arrests. [4] This only ended after she was arrested in early 2014 for driving under the influence and battery of an officer. [7] She served 37 days in jail of a 90-day sentence starting in March 2014, and wrote a 2018 book about her experience. [5]
Schwartz has taught creative writing at numerous institutions including the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and Jewish Women's Theatre, and continues to teach at the summer writing festival at the University of Iowa. [8] [9] [10] She served as president of the board of directors of PEN Center USA, the Los Angeles literary and human rights organization, from 2006-2007. [11]
In 2006, as part of PEN, Schwartz was hired through a grant by the California Council for the Humanities to teach a 10-week creative writing class for former Los Angeles gang members at Homeboy Industries, an intervention program founded by Father Gregory Boyle. [12] After the class was over, she stayed on as a volunteer. [13] The Los Angeles Times wrote about her volunteer work. [6]
In 2008, Schwartz became the founder of the Homeboy Press and editor-in-chief of the Homeboy Review literary magazine, which included the former gang members' writing along with that of professionals. [14] The magazine published two annual issues. [15]
In 1997, Schwartz won the $2,500 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for her unpublished novel, Jumping the Green, beating out over 500 other applicants. As a result of winning, Schwartz signed a contract with the Elaine Markson Literary Agency in New York. [16] Jumping the Green was published October 1, 1999, by Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-85589-5. It tells the story of a young San Francisco sculptor examining her sister's unsolved murder while being in a sadomasochistic relationship. It was widely reviewed in the United States and the United Kingdom. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]
Angels Crest (Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-51185-8) is a 2004 novel about a toddler wandering off in the snowy California mountains, and the aftermath in a small town where nearly everyone has a personal connection to the tragedy. The story is told from seven different points of view. It received mixed reviews, calling it pounding, but also maudlin. [23] [24]
The book was made into a 2011 Canadian-American film of the same title, directed by Gaby Dellal and starring Thomas Dekker, Lynn Collins, and Mira Sorvino. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, and was widely released by Magnolia Pictures in December. [25]
In 2018, Schwartz published her memoir The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time (Blue Rider Press, ISBN 978-0525534631) about her 2014 sentence in the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, California. It juxtaposes her experiences in jail with the 22 books she had sent to her there, each of which seemed to arrive at the most appropriate time. Schwartz especially credits Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being for changing her life. [26] The memoir also sympathetically describes the women that she was imprisoned with, and criticizes the cruel and dehumanizing system that incarcerates them without treating them. [5] The book received favorable reviews. [27] [28] [29]
Slow River is a science fiction novel by British writer Nicola Griffith, first published in 1995. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Lambda Literary Award. The novel received critical praise for its writing and setting, while its use of multiple narrative modes was criticised.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels, as well as a short story were adapted into films.
Suzanne Collins is an American author and television writer. She is best known as the author of the young adult dystopian book series The Hunger Games.
Ellen Louise Hopkins is a novelist who has published several New York Times bestselling novels that are popular among the teenage and young adult audience.
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award: for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
The Vintner's Luck is a romantic fantasy novel by New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox, first published in 1998. It was her fourth full-length novel, and her first book published outside New Zealand. The novel charts the relationship between a French winemaker, Sobran Jodeau, and an angel, Xas, who first visits Jodeau on a midsummer's eve in 1808, when he is 18 years old, and again each year on the same day. The novel won several prestigious awards including the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the inaugural Tasmania Pacific Region Prize for best novel. It was adapted into a 2009 film.
Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright primarily of LGBT literature. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Ashley Little is a Canadian author of both adult and young adult literature.
Helen "Nell" Louise Zink is an American writer living in Germany. After being a long term penpal of Avner Shats, she came to prominence in her fifties with the help of Jonathan Franzen and her novel, Mislaid, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her debut The Wallcreeper was released in the United States by the independent press Dorothy and named one of 100 notable books of 2014 by The New York Times, as was Mislaid. Zink then released Nicotine, Private Novelist and Doxology through Ecco Press. In 2022 she published Avalon, again a New York Times notable book, with Alfred A. Knopf.
Lucha Corpi is a Chicana poet and mystery writer. She was born on April 13, 1945, in Jaltipan, Veracruz, Mexico. In 1975 she earned a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1979 she earned a M.A. in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. Corpi's most important contribution to Chicano literature, a series of four poems called "The Marina Poems ," appeared in the anthology The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation, which was published by W. W. Norton & Company, in 1976 (ISBN 9780393044218).
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Angie Thomas is an American young adult author, best known for writing The Hate U Give (2017). Her second young adult novel, On the Come Up, was released on February 25, 2019.
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Joanne C. Hillhouse is a creative writer, journalist, producer and educator from Antigua and Barbuda. Her writing encompasses novels, short stories, poetry and children's books, and she has contributed to many publications in the Caribbean region as well as internationally, among them the anthologies Pepperpot (2014) and New Daughters of Africa (2019). Hillhouse's books include the poetry collection On Becoming (2003), the novellas The Boy from Willow Bend (2003) and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight (2004), the children's books Fish Outta Water and With Grace, the novel Oh Gad! (2012), and the young adult novel Musical Youth (2014), which was runner-up for the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature. She was named by Literary Hub as one of "10 Female Caribbean Authors You Should Know". An advocate for the development of the arts in Antigua and Barbuda, she founded the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize in 2004.
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