Frances Lefkowitz

Writer and editor Frances Lefkowitz grew up poor in San Francisco in the 1970s, and went on to write about it in her memoir, TO HAVE NOT, named one of five "Best Memoirs of 2010″ by SheKnows.com. She's now at work on a second memoir, about learning to surf at age 36, breaking her neck doing it at age 44, and getting back up on the board a year later. Andrei Codrescu has said, "Frances Lefkowitz writes with grace, wistfulness, melancholy, and strength. The road to self-knowledge is twisted and arduous, but when it goes through a writer as good as Ms. Lefkowitz, the ride is a delight." She blogs about writing and publishing at PaperInMyShoe.com, and can also be found at FrancesLekowitz.net.

Frances has a growing reputation for her writing workshops, and has appeared with Cheryl Strayed and Malachy and Alfie McCourt at Omega Institute's Memoir Festival and The Sun magazine's Into the Fire writing weekends at Esalen Institute. She's also founded the grant-funded Community Memoir Project, teaching free memoir-writing workshops in public libraries, to help create a 'history of the rest of us.'

The former Senior Editor of Body+Soul magazine, aka Martha Stewart's Whole Living, Frances is the Book Reviewer for Good Housekeeping, and a freelance writer for Health, National Geographic Green Guide, Natural Health, Utne Reader, The Sun and other consumer and literary magazines. Her fiction, short stories, and flash fiction appear in Tin House, Glimmer Train, Fiction, Frederick Barthelme's New World Writing, and more. And lately she's been writing the nonfiction version of flash fiction; these micro-memoirs are in Superstition Review, Memoir Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, and more. If she wanted to brag, she'd mention her Notable Mentions for the Pushcart Prize (twice) and Best American essays), a James Beard Award nomination in Food Writing, a Fellowship in Literature from the state of RI, an invited stay at the Hedgebrook Writers Colony and other awards and accolades.

But she'd rather tell you about her hobbies, which are surfing and speaking Spanish. Born and raised in San Francisco, she spent twenty-odd years on the East Coast, and is now settled back in Northern California.