Louise Wareham Leonard

Louise Wareham Leonard (born 1965) is an American writer born in New Zealand.

Early life and education
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.

Career
Leonard was a cadet and then Junior Reporter aged fifteen through eighteen at Manhattan's "Our Town" and at the former Dominion Post in Wellington, New Zealand; she wrote news,reviews and several features. Age 20, when a college student at Columbia College, New York she was an intern reporter in Time's New York bureau. This was followed by working as a sub-editor and then a primarily travel writer and book reviewer. Leonard was assistant to Black liberation theology founder Rev. Prof. James H. Cone at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. She later co-established a not-for-profit aboriginal-owned art center in the outback town of Mt Magnet in Western Australia.

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

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. " It won the 1999 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Award.

Miss Me A Lot Of is a story about "the fate of beauty and attractiveness." ."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

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". It was the basis of the 2016 podcast "52 Men the Podcast: Women Telling Stories about Men" with 25 episodes featuring Lynne Tillman, Jane Alison, Caroline Leavitt, Emily Holleman, Mia Funk, Eliza Factor, Julia Slavin and many more.

Other publications by Leonard include Blood Is Blood, and the essay "The German Crowd" (2020). Her work has been published in Poetry , Tin House, TheRumpus.net, Art Monthly Australia and elsewhere.

Works

 * Fiery World (Amazon Kindle, 2022)
 * Blood is Blood (Amazon Kindle, 2022)
 * Since You Ask (Akashic Books, New York, 2004)
 * Miss Me A Lot Of (Victoria University Press, New Zealand, 2007)
 * 52 Men (Red Hen Press, Pasadena, 2015)
 * "The German Crowd" (Subnivean, 2020)

Awards and honors

 * 1986 Columbia College, Columbia University Representative in the Mount Holyoke Poetry Prize, with judges Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky
 * 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"
 * 1999 James Jones First Novel Award for a novel in Progress
 * 2006, 2008 Finalist for The New Zealand Prize in Modern Letters
 * 2008 Creative New Zealand Grant
 * 2016 Founding Member of the Academy of New Zealand Literature