Leon Marks

Beyond writing fiction, my background combines corporate, creative, and academic experience. For example, I’ve been teaching graduate and undergraduate communications at City University of New York since 2012 and at Johns Hopkins since 2021. Previously, I spent 22 years working in corporate communications, advising senior executives at 3M, Dow Jones, General Electric, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Heineken, HSBC, Lincoln Financial, Microsoft and Standard & Poor’s, among many others. Having begun my career as an advertising copywriter, I later served as Senior Managing Director for a global communications consultancy which I helped lead through a management buyout and subsequent sale to a larger firm.

My academic background is on the literary side: I majored in English Literature at the University of Rhode Island and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. I’ve published short fiction in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, and I served as editor of “Now What? The Creative Writer’s Guide to Success After the MFA” (Fairfield University Press). I love dogs, churches, books, birds, history, travel, my big family, and especially film noir, a type of crime movies from the 1940’s and 1950’s which I’ve explored in detail in a comprehensive website called Heart of Noir. I live in Rhode Island, where I was born and raised, and in Puerto Rico for part of the year.