Who Is Leslie Jamison?

Leslie Jamison certainly has some weighty credentials—though I am in a quandary as to which element of her neophytic novelist capsule-bio/gestalt moved me to pick up her debut novel, The Gin Closet (Free Press). I am even considering the subliminal connection to my reading of Dan Okrent’s new tome The Last Call, which provides a history of Prohibition (and mentions a alcoholic beverage entitled Black Cock Vigor Gin—marketed to black Americans in the most venal manner, as if the appellation were not sufficiently degenerate). Or perhaps it was the cover—with negligee and bare thigh in a photo that might have been considered risqué in the States even up until the 1970s.

More likely, as Jamison went to Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and did a stint of education work in Nicaragua (one of my favorite Central American nations) and now is a doing Ph.D. work at Yale, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by writer and Iowa mentor Charles D’Ambrosio, my selecting her tome from various leaning towers of equally promising old-fashioned reading appliances was simply serendipitous.  

Then I began to encounter more enticing tidbits, such as an interview in the Yale Daily News, which contained these gems:

As for Jamison’s debut opus, you can read about it here.