Louise Wareham Leonard

Louise Wareham Leonard is an American writer born in New Zealand.^[1][2]

Louise Wareham Leonard immigrated from New Zealand to New York City in 1977 with her family. Her older brother is singer-songwriter Dean Wareham, most known for his work with Galaxie 500 and Luna.

While in school, Leonard was a reporter at the capital city newspaper The Dominion Post in Wellington, New Zealand; she wrote news, reviews and features. At age eighteen, in New York City, she joined TIME magazine as a part-time secretary; at twenty, while a college student at Columbia College, New York she was an intern reporter in Time's New York bureau.

Leonard was then a magazine writer,mostly in travel.^[3] She was also a part time assistant to Black liberation theology founder Rev. Prof. James H. Cone at the Union Theological Seminary in New York.^[4]

In 2011, she co-established a not-for-profit aboriginal-owned art center in the outback town of Mt Magnet in Western Australia.^[5]

Her novels and novellas explore ‘the search for sanity’ (Dame Fiona Kidman) in a world of ‘priapic narcissism’ (Stout scholar John Newton.^[6])

Since You Ask is an "intense and insightful work about a childhod sexual abuse Survivor that portrays a complicated character and her multifaceted mind with deep empathy.^[7]" It won the 1999 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Award.^[8]

Miss Me A Lot Of is a story about "the fate of beauty and attractiveness."^[9]."Like uncovering a secret, finding a good novel puts one deliciously in the know, with the accompanying thrills of disclosure. Miss Me a Lot Of provides thrills galore; it is simply stunning." -Louise O'Brien, The Dominion Post ^[10]

52 Men centers on Elise McKnight and fifty-two vignettes of her interactions with various men. The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote "Although in style and tone 52 Men differs from either Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nightss or Renata Adler’s Speedboat, it is, like both of these books, a novel of impressions unified by the author’s sensibility".^[11]

Other publications by Leonard include Blood Is Blood,^[12] and the essay "The German Crowd" (2020).^[13] Her work has been published in Poetry^[14], Tin House,^[15] TheRumpus.net,^[16] Art Monthly Australia^[17] and elsewhere.^[18][19][20]

"52 Men the Podcast: Women Telling Stories about Men" is a 25 episode series featuring one writer per episode. Authors include Lynne Tillman, Mia Funk,Jane Alison, Caroline Leavitt, Emily Holleman, Eliza Factor, Julia Slavin and many more.^[21]

• Fiery World (Amazon Kindle, 2022)^[22]
• Blood is Blood (Amazon Kindle, 2022)^[23]
• Since You Ask (Akashic Books, New York, 2004)^[24]
• Miss Me A Lot Of (Victoria University Press, New Zealand, 2007)^[25]
• 52 Men (Red Hen Press, Pasadena, 2015) ^[26]
• "The German Crowd" (Subnivean, 2020)^[27]

• 1986 Columbia College, Columbia University Representative in the Mount Holyoke Poetry Prize, with judges Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky^[28]
• 1986 Columbia College, Columbia University, Andrew D. Fried Memorial Prize "given to a senior in Columbia College judged by the Columbia College English Department to have excelled in both critical and creative writing"^[29]
• 1999 James Jones First Novel Award for a novel in Progress^[30]
• 2006, 2008 Finalist for The New Zealand Prize in Modern Letters^[31]
• 2008 Creative New Zealand Grant^[32]
• 2016 Founding Member of the Academy of New Zealand Literature^[33]

• New Zealand Academy of Literature