Leslie Pietrzyk
I am the author of Silver Girl, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day (novels)...and, just out in November, Admit This to No One (short stories about official DC). My collection of linked stories about the death of my first husband, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Short fiction & essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, Washingtonian, The Collagist, and Cincinnati Review. Oh, and one of my stories was awarded a 2020 Pushcart Prize--!!! I'm a member of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program.
If I'm not writing, what I love most to do is cook...which is probably apparent from my books and stories, which are filled with food. Fun facts: Once I won the blue ribbon for chocolate chip cookies at the Virginia State Fair. Check out my website for a recipe for the best Thanksgiving stuffing in the world!
A guide for book clubs is posted on my website. Also...recipes!
“This darkness is for sleeping, for escape; it's where I go when the other places ache with light; this is where I curl up and close my eyes and darkness flows like lava, and I dissapear into what, into nothing, into pure dark, into what there is before there is anything else.”