About Leslie
USA Today and New York Times Best-Selling Author
Writer/Producer Feature Films
Recovery Advocate
Featured Speaker
Leslie Glass grew up in New York City where she was raised by Ja Fa Wei, the Chinese chef from Hong Kong, who taught her to cook absolutely everything. Joe Pilates, the family personal trainer, “designed” her body and was her fitness coach when she was a teen. Her mother, Elinor Gordon, a civil rights and social activist, was a protégé of Elinor Roosevelt and held the first conference on Race in America in her home on Martha’s Vineyard for President Johnson. Leslie’s mother believed that Coming Out meant visits to jails, family court and homeless shelters. Leslie’s TV and film producer father, Milton Gordon, needed a new TV series after his success with Lassie and offered Leslie $100 to create one. She created the TV series, Fury. Leslie received $100 for the show and was told to stay out of the business. So Leslie studied classical guitar and voice at the Mannes College of music and received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College where Joseph Campbell was her don and Grace Paley her writing professor. While Leslie did not have the skills to be a professional musician, her professors and mentors did not echo the family view on her writing potential.
Leslie has worked as a writer in a variety of formats. In New York she worked in advertising, publishing, and at New York Magazine, where she started and wrote the Intelligencer column. She was a free lance magazine writer of both feature articles and fiction. Leslie is also a playwright and worked as a scriptwriter on The Guiding Light before turning to fiction full time. She is the author of 15 novels including 9 best-selling April Woo thrillers. Her novel, Over His Dead Body, which was first produced by Robert Brustein as the play, Strokes, was optioned for a feature film. Her novels Getting Away with It, Modern Love, and the April Woo series were all optioned for feature films.
Leslie’s independent feature film company, Rehab Productions, is proud to present as its first documentary feature film. “The Secret World of Recovery” had its first public screening on April 10, 2011 at the Center for Performing Arts in Sarasota to a sold out audience of 1650 and a standing ovation. In her non profit life, Leslie served as president of Plays for Living, a national organization that has been creating and producing plays on social issues for a wide range of audiences for 70 years. She served as Public Member of the Middle States Commission of Higher Education for six years, was trustee of The New York City Police Foundation for many years, a vice president of the Asolo Repertory Theatre, board member of Sarasota Reading Festival and r Writers of America.
Deeply committed to giving back, Leslie established the Leslie Glass Foundation in 1990 to support important non profit organizations and professor-student mentoring in a wide variety of projects. As Glass fans avidly devoured her powerful New York cautionary tales, real life Leslie Glass Fellows at NYU School of Social Work, NYU Law School, CUNY Graduate Center, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The National Center for Victims of Crime, The New York City Police Foundation, and Ringling College have been working to better understand our world and help improve it. Whatever subjects Leslie explores in her work become projects for education and giving back.
In the spring of 2011, Leslie Glass with her daughter, Lindsey, established the non profit foundation Reach Out Recovery to promote addiction prevention, recovery education and community solutions. http://www.reachoutrecovery.com