Geoffrey Leavenworth

Personal tragedy can be fascinating, but personal tragedy distilled into art can be absolutely compelling. And so it is with Geoffrey Leavenworth's first novel, Isle of Misfortune, which is based on his first-hand experience...

At the age of 10, Geoff Leavenworth was the editor and publisher of The Bayou Press, which provided comprehensive news coverage of the north shore of a very short stretch of Dickinson Bayou. The neighborhood served by the newspaper was bordered by an abandoned pecan orchard, a dairy farm, and an abandoned gambling casino. Dickinson was a quiet unincorporated corner of Galveston County, Texas--until the Manned Spacecraft Center was built about 10 miles away in the early 1960s. Suddenly, Bayou Drive and the rest of the hamlet, thick with aerospace engineers and astronauts, was thrust into the space age.

A graduate of New Mexico Military Institute and The University of Texas at Austin, Leavenworth has worked as a writer, editor, and journalist for almost his entire adult life. In college he was editor of Pearl, a general interest magazine named for Janis Joplin. The monthly publication was a supplement to the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, with a circulation of 40,000. After graduation in 1975 and a stint as an assistant editor at a restaurant magazine, he began contributing to The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Texas Business, and other publications.

He joined the staff of Texas Business in 1978, working in its Dallas and Houston offices. Three years later he answered the siren call of freelance life once again. During the 1980s he covered the space program in Houston for Time magazine. He also served as a restaurant critic for Texas Monthly, riding what he came to describe as the "red snapper circuit," a territory that included the Kemah waterfront, Galveston Island, and Bolivar Peninsula.

In 1985 he received one of his favorite assignments--writing the text of Historic Galveston, a book on Galveston architecture published by Herring Press and illustrated with the remarkable photography of Richard Payne. In addition to his freelance work, he also was the first editor of Biomedical Inquiry, a magazine published by The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. His medical research reporting was honored with the Robert Fenley Science Writing Award bestowed by the Association of American Medical Colleges. In 1988 his work on the collapse of the savings and loan industry earned a Katy Award for best magazine news story from the Press Club of Dallas.

In the early 1990s Leavenworth wrote frequently on health care topics and served as a contributing editor to several publications in the field. For six years he was chief speechwriter for the president of The University of Texas.

Isle of Misfortune is his first novel. He is at work on the next.