Ann Z.Leventhal

Ann Z. Leventhal (full name Ann Zinman Leventhal) is a Connecticut-based fiction and nonfiction writer whose work runs across novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and reviews. A journalist at heart, she frames her fiction around the classic four questions, Who, Where, What, and Why, a method she credits for how she builds character and justifies a scene. She has lived in Greater Hartford for most of her adult life and winters in Florida.

Her first novel, Life-Lines (Magic Circle Press, 1987), follows a wife who escapes with her husband's mistress. Her second, Among the Survivors (She Writes Press, 2017), sets a modern Cinderella plot inside a Holocaust-era mystery. Her short fiction has appeared in South Dakota Review, Vignettes, and Christopher Street; her poems in Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Passages North, and Puerta del Sol; and her criticism and reviews in Publishers Weekly, Maenad, and The New York Times Book Review. She has also written a play, advertising copy, and speeches for a political candidate.

Her one JEF Books title is The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir (2022), which won the 2022 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, the prize the press awards each year to an adventurous unpublished novel. The book is a hybrid form she calls a fictmoir, a memoir-fiction crossover that traces the life of an ordinary New York Jewish woman across marriage, motherhood, illness, loss, and survival.

Start with The Makings of a Nobody, the only book of hers JEF holds and the work that brought her onto the list.