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In 1997, Schwartz won the $2,500 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for her unpublished novel, Jumping the Green, beating out over 500 other applicants.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]
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
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.
Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. She began her career writing short stories and plays, which were often censored by the Soviet government, and following perestroika, published a number of well-respected works of prose.
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, the story of Strayed's 1995 hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, is an international bestseller and was adapted into the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
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, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015–2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), she has published eight novels, many short stories, and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her essays on literary themes have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
Katherine Sherar Pannill Center is an American author of contemporary fiction.
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.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
Ashley Little is a Canadian author of both adult and young adult literature.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
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.
Erin Bow is an American-born Canadian author. Among other awards and honors, she won the 2011 TD Canadian Children's Literature Award for Plain Kate, the 2014 Monica Hughes Award for Sorrow's Knot, the 2016 Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award for The Scorpion Rules, and a 2019 Governor General's Award for Stand on the Sky.
Dana Jae Schwartz is an American journalist, screenwriter and author. She was previously a correspondent at Entertainment Weekly; she is also the author of five books. She also writes and hosts Noble Blood, a historical weekly podcast for iHeartMedia about the dark side of monarchy.
Ellen J. Levy is an American writer and academic who was an associate professor of English at Colorado State University before retiring from this role. Her collection of short stories, Love, In Theory, was published in 2012, and her first novel, The Cape Doctor, in 2021 to positive reviews.
Jen Beagin is an American novelist and writer.
Sheila Schwartz was an American writer and creative writing professor. Her short story collection Imagine a Great White Light won a Pushcart Press Editor's Award and was named one of the best books of 1991 by USA Today, and her short story "Afterbirth" won a 1999 O. Henry Award.
Beach Read is a 2020 contemporary romance novel by Emily Henry. An audiobook was released by Penguin Random House Audio.
Insurrecto is a 2018 Philippine novel published by Gina Apostol. It explores an incident in Balangiga, Eastern Samar in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation, American soldiers created "a howling wilderness" of the surrounding countryside. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
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