Leni Zumas

Leni Zumas (2018)

Leni Zumas is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of two novels (Red Clocks and The Listeners) and a story collection (Farewell Navigator). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, The Cut, The Sunday Times Style (UK), Tin House, Lenny Letter, The Collagist, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.[1] She directs the MFA and BFA programs at Portland State University.[2]

Life

Zumas grew up in Washington, D.C., where she attended the Sidwell Friends School. She graduated from Brown University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program. Before Portland State, she taught writing at Columbia University, Hunter College, Eugene Lang College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

Writing

Zumas's first book, Farewell Navigator: Stories, was published in 2008 by Open City. Miranda July said of the collection: "If darkness has ever been your friend, your story is in here."[3] "It's a rare writer who can bring us closer to people we might cross the street to avoid," wrote a reviewer in L.A. Weekly.[4] Zumas was profiled in Poets & Writers magazine's 2008 Debut Fiction issue[5] and featured in the documentary 60 Writers/60 Places (2010) by Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro.[6]

The Listeners came out in 2012, from Tin House, and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.[7] Powell's Books chose the novel for their Indiespensable First Edition Club.[8]

Zumas's second novel, Red Clocks (Little, Brown, 2018), was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, an IndieBound Indie Next List pick, and a Publishers Weekly "Top 10 Literary Fiction" selection. Naomi Alderman's New York Times review called the novel "a lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women's lives"; Ploughshares described it as "a reckoning, a warning, and nothing short of a miracle." Maggie Nelson wrote, "Red Clocks is funny, mordant, baroque, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring—not to mention a way forward for fiction now."

Red Clocks was published in the UK by The Borough Press/HarperCollins[9], in Italy by Bomipiani (Orologi rossi, translated by Milena Zemira Ciccimarra),[10] in Poland by Czarna Owca (Czerwone zegary, translated by Agniezska Patrycja Wyszogrodzka-Gaik), in France by Presses de la Cité (Les heures rouges, translated by Anne Rabinovitch), in Spain by Ediciones Destino (Relojes de sangre, translated by Mariana Hernández Cruz), and in Mexico by Planeta Mexico (Relojes de sangre, translated by Mariana Hernández Cruz). Other editions are forthcoming in Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Bibliography

  • Farewell Navigator. Open City, 2008. ISBN 9781890447496
  • The Listeners. Tin House, 2012. ISBN 9781935639299
  • Red Clocks. Little, Brown, 2018. ISBN 9781478944072

References

  1. ↑ Author website
  2. ↑ Portland State Creative Writing Program
  3. ↑ Author website
  4. ↑ Marc Weingarten (July 9, 2008), "Janet Sarbanes and Leni Zumas: New short fiction tackles unsettling subject matter," L.A. Weekly
  5. ↑ "First Fiction: Our Annual Look at Summer's Debut Stars," Poets & Writers magazine
  6. ↑ Little Burn Films
  7. ↑ Literary Arts
  8. ↑ Powell's Books
  9. ↑ The Borough Press
  10. ↑ Bompiani
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