Lev AC Rosen

Lev AC Rosen was born on April 13th, and while he enjoys telling everyone it was a Friday, it was in fact, a Monday. He grew up on the lower west side of Manhattan, across the street from a building in which they made pasta sauce, so his memories of early mornings are always tinged with the smell of tomatoes.

He attended Oberlin College, in Ohio (Majors in Creative Writing and English), after which he ran as quickly as possible back to Manhattan, got his MFA in creative writing (fiction) from Sarah Lawrence College, and began his attempt at happily ever after, very far downtown.

During his short (very very short) lifetime, Lev has studied with David Young, David Walker, David Hollander, and many people not named David including Mary LaChapelle, Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Paul Lisicky, Whitney Otto, Arnost Lustig, Brian Morton, Joan Silber, and his mentor who first told him to major in creative writing (and very possibly regrets it), Dan Chaon.

Lev’s short story, Painting was the inaugural piece for the ‘New Voices’ section of the renowned Esopus magazine. He was also the fiction editor for Lostwriters.net on which he had a weekly column in which he ranted and made very little sense. He has finished several novels, his first being Chain-Link Fence, and his most recent being the Steampunk comic romance, Like Clockwork. All his books are quite brilliant, according to his mother.

Being Pagan, Lev’s work often focuses on more magical aspects of life, and some have defined it as ‘magical realism.’ However, also being a New Yorker, much of his work takes place in the city he loves, and the magic within the stories comes from urban features: lamp-posts, subways, skylines. However, when these urban magical realism novels didn’t sell (though he got some really very lovely rejection letters), he decided to write some steampunk, cause he loves it, and cause it’s more marketable.

Lev is currently represented in his literary works by Joy Tutela, of the David Black Literary Agency, who is better looking than all other literary agents combined.

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