Winner of the 2019 W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections
Though always a voracious reader, Louise began her career as a graphic designer and art director for magazines, working with illustrators and photographers to bring visual life to journalism, a job for which she was educated at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, far from her native Baltimore. Visual art has been and continues to be an important facet of her life, but with her desire to write growing ever more urgent, she eventually enrolled in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, earning an MFA in fiction.
Short stories have always been Louise’s passion. Her work is informed by authors such as John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Munro, Jill McCorkle, Richard Bausch, Tessa Hadley, and Deborah Eisenberg, among many others, and though she reads everything, nonfiction as well as fiction short and long, she writes short stories exclusively. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, The Southampton Review, Narrative, The Chicago Quarterly Review and others, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
She is the author of a previous collection of stories, The Truth About Me, which was named by the San Francisco Chronicle and Entropy as a best book of 2017, won the Independent Publishers Book Awards Gold Medal for short story collections, and was shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. She has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writing Workshops, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Ultimately, Louise earned her BA from New York University, having left art school after her junior year to experience “real life” working at graphic design studio. Still a happy resident of New York City, she lives in one of the remaining live/work lofts in Soho with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg (also a native of Baltimore) and their three French Bulldogs. She and her husband work within sight of each other all day, every day, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Louise Marburg’s award-winning collection No Diving Allowed in the fall of 2021.
