Leni Zumas

Leni Zumas is the author of three books of fiction: Red Clocks, forthcoming from Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown; The Listeners, published by Tin House in 2012, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; and Farewell Navigator: Stories, published in 2008 by Open City. Her fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Quarterly West, Keyhole, Salt Hill, Gigantic, Open City, and New York Tyrant.
A graduate of Brown University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program, Zumas is an associate professor of English at Portland State University. She has also taught at Columbia University, Hunter College, Eugene Lang College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

"Zumas gives socially awkward, mysteriously gifted and self-destructive outcasts spellbinding, unflinching voice in her debut collection," wrote Publishers Weekly. "It's a powerful, irresistible collection.

L.A. Weekly observed, "It's a rare writer who can bring us closer to people we might cross the street to avoid."

Writer and filmmaker Miranda July said of the collection: "If darkness has ever been your friend, your story is in here."

Zumas was profiled in Poets & Writers magazine's 2008 Debut Fiction issue and featured in the documentary 60 Writers/60 Places (2010) by Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro.