Laurie Foos

LAURIE FOOS had the fine luck of having her first novel, Ex Utero, rescued from the slush pile at Coffee House Press. Ex Utero was published in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Spain and was adapted for the stage by a small theater company in Athens, GA. A novel about a woman who loses her uterus in a shopping mall, Ex Utero was chosen for “Plot of the Week” by Entertainment Weekly, and was awarded The San Diego Current’s “Hot Tamale Award.” The novel was also featured in The Los Angeles View’s “Highlights of 1995.”

Foos’s second novel, Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist (subtitled “A Novel About Art, Bowling, Pizza Sex, and Hairspray”), was published in hardcover by Coffee House Press and in trade paper by Harvest Harcourt in 1997; it was also published in the UK and Germany (as Mach Mir Das Walross) that same year. Kirkus Reviews called it “A mad tale of a mad genius by a young author who may be a genius herself.” Her third novel, Twinship, published by Harcourt Brace in September 1999, was published in Germany under the title Alter Ego.

In 2002, Coffee House Press published Foos’s novel Bingo Under the Crucifix, and in May 2005, they published her fifth novel, Before Elvis There Was Nothing.

In July 2015, Coffee House published, The Blue Girl. Early praise for The Blue Girl called it “Foos’s best…a stunning novel about despair” (Entropy) with a “swirling vortex of complicated psychologies” that makes the novel impressive and heartbreaking” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). The Riveter named it one of the “Books to Read Summer 2015, calling it, “part fantasy but totally fantastical,” a book that will give your sweet tooth a twinge of the rottenness that exists in all of this, and a taste of the dark secrets unsaid, especially between mothers and daughters.”

Foos has also written two books, The Giant Baby and Toast, as part of Gemma Media’s Open Door Series, an organization devoted to increasing literacy. She is currently finishing a novel for middle grade readers titled, Pieces of the Moon, about two siblings, one of whom is on the autism spectrum.

Foos teaches in the BFA program at Goddard College and the MFA program at Lesley University. She lives on Long Island with her two kids.