Louise is a writer who explores darkness to find light — in often extreme worlds of privilege, violence and exile. Unique in her work is a vision of beauty amidst pain. She embodies, says Amanda Fortini in the Los Angeles Review of Books, a woman alone, “itinerant, deracinated, distant from family, and making it up as she goes…”

A few works:

52 Men (Red Hen Press) is a novel in crots compared to Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. It is also noted for its celebrity cameos including Obama press secretary Jay Carney, Michael Stipe, Lou Reed, Jand Jonathan Franzen. It tracks the repercusssions of an abusive childhood relationship on one young woman.

Since You Ask (Akashic Books) is a novel set in Manhattan and a Connecticut hospital, featuring extensive dialogue with a doctor as a young woman looks at her childhood sexual abuse.

Miss Me A Lot Of (VUP press) sets two stories against eachother, inspired by George Perec’s W or A Memory of Chilhood and the stories of Rick Moody.

Fiery World (The Creative Process) is a fairytale on the jouney out of grief.

Louise has also written for Tin House (an essay on living in the outback), The New Yorker (a letter on the value of pain) and The Rumpus (Funny Women: How to Date A Writer). She has a questionnaire on Kurt Cobain’s “Ashes” in Gargoyle and poetry in journals including Poetry where she was frst published in the 90s.

Her teaching often returns to experimental forms and manueuvers for inspiration and energy.

HISTORY

Louise was born in New Zealand and grew up in New York City from age 12, working summers as a news reporter. She graduated from the UN International School and Columbia College, New York, working her way through college at TIME. At 20, where she was an intern reporter age 20. She is fluent in French and a lifelong enthusiast of German.

Age 22, on leaving TIME and brief positions at Christie's, The Associated Press, and the New York Stock Exchange, she explored the Deep South by car. She lived in Oxford, Mississippi for a year, clerking in the emergency room and at Square Books, exploring the Delta and area with late friends Willie Morris and Ron Shapiro.

She spent a summer in a Connecticut hospital and took a job at a local magazine, becoming a travel writer based in the U.S, with journeys in the Caribbean, Europe and the Aegean. At 28, she left the magazine to focus on her own writing. 

She since worked many jobs at places such as The Union Theological Seminary, the Vermont Studio Center and as a book reviewer in New Zealand. She co-founded an Aboriginal art gallery in outback Australia and was from 2020 to 2022 an Adjunct Professor of British and American Literature.

Louise has won awards including best critical and creative writer at Columbia, a Times Mirror Magazine editing award, the James Jones Award and a Creative New Zealand grant. She is a two time finalist for The Prize in Modern Letters and a member of The New Zealand Academy of Literature.

Louise has long served as a volunteer supporting refugees in New Zealand and Manhattan through the International Rescue Committee. Since 2023, she has lived in Hawaii with her husband Matthew Leonard and written for a global support group for adults abused as children.