Lewis Buzbee

Agent: Allison Remcheck Pernetti

Lewis Buzbee is a fourth-generation Californian. He began writing at the unripe age of 15, after reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and things haven’t changed much since.

He has worked as a dishwasher, a bookseller, a publisher, a caterer, a bartender, and as a teacher of writing. Since 2000, he’s been on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. He and his wife, the poet Julie Bruck, live with their daughter Maddy in San Francisco, half a block from Golden Gate Park. His most book recent for adults is The Yellow Lighted Bookshop, a history of bookselling, from Graywolf Press. Blackboard: The Life of the Classroom, was published by Graywolf in 2012.

Lewis’s first middle grade novel, Steinbeck’s Ghost, was published in 2008 by Feiwel and Friends and was selected for these honors: a Smithsonian Notable Book, a Northern California Book Award Nominee, the Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Association Children’s Book of the Year, and the California Library Association’s John and Patricia Beatty Award.

The Haunting of Charles Dickens, published by Feiwel and Friends in September, 2010, won the Northern California Book Award, was nominated for an Edgar Award, and was chosen as a Judy Lopez Memorial Award Honor Book.

A third middle grade novel, Mark Twain and the River of Time, was published by Feiwel and Friends.

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