About William Loizeaux

William Loizeaux was born and raised in New Jersey, forty miles from New York City.  There he attended the local public schools and, during high school, worked summer jobs as a road department laborer and greenkeeper’s assistant.  He earned his B.A. in English and History from Colgate University, and it was there, in a Herman Melville seminar led by fiction writer Frederick Busch, where his interest in creative writing and its power to amuse, inform, and move a reader, was born. 

Bill went on to earn an M.A. in American Studies at the University of Michigan, where he met the woman who would become his wife, and together they moved to a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C.  While she taught at the University of Maryland, he wrote fiction in the mornings, painted houses in the afternoons, and began publishing his short stories.  Then, suddenly, his life and writing changed.  At six months old, his first daughter died, and out of pure necessity, he began a journal—part memoir, part diary—that chronicled his thoughts, feelings, and how he and his wife were coping and not coping with their loss. That journal, an outpouring of grief and love, became Anna: A Daughter’s Life, which was published to glowing reviews and named a 1993 New York Times Notable Book. 

By this time, Bill was doing less house painting and was leading writing workshops.  He started at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, then did a semester as Visiting Writer at Arizona State University, and for more than a decade was a faculty member and Writer-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University.  During those years, and again to appreciative reviews, he published his second book, The Shooting of Rabbit Wells, a memoir about the killing of a high school classmate, which provoked discussion of the line between fact and fiction and led to his op-ed piece in The Christian Science Monitor.  While his second daughter was growing up, he was engaged in a variety of projects: personal essays, stories, and two novels for children, Clarence Cochran, A Human Boy, and Wings, which received the 2006 ASPCA Henry Berg Children’s Book Award, among other honors.  

Those were also the years when he began thinking about and writing his first novel for adult readers, The Tumble Inn, which is about a couple who leaves suburban New Jersey to become innkeepers in the Adirondack Mountains, where they encounter immense joy and tragedy.  Here you will find many of Bill’s sustaining virtues as an author: his eye for the humorous paradoxes and disjunctions in life, his awareness of how setting and history affect character, his devotion to clear and evocative prose that balances action and reflection, and his penchant for dramatic, moving, and ultimately life-affirming stories of human struggle. 

With Into the Wind, Bill has returned to children’s fiction, a novel inspired by his childhood friendship with a sometimes prickly but always imaginative aunt who loved painting and sailing.

Bill recently retired as Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at Boston University. He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.