Background

Adrian LeBlanc was born on December 9, 1963, in Leominster, Massachusetts. She grew up in central Massachusetts. Her father was a union organizer, and her mother worked as a fiscal coordinator at a substance abuse treatment center.

Education

Adrian LeBlanc attended Smith College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1986. Besides, she studied at Oxford University and received there a Master of Arts in philosophy and modern literature in 1988. LeBlanc also graduated from Yale Law School, where she got a Master of Arts in law studies in 1993.

Career

In 1988-1992 Adrian LeBlanc worked as an editor for Seventeen Magazine and was a guest lecturer for non-fiction prose at several universities, including Yale, Boston University, and Columbia. Her works appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Elle, Spin, The Source, The Village Voice, and other magazines and also anthologized in The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence. To date, LeBlanc is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and a Visiting Scholar at the New York University School of Journalism.

As a writer, Adrian LeBlanc is the author of the book Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx. Based on ten years of research LeBlanc undertook in following two young Latina residents of the Bronx, the book recounts the ups and many downs in the lives of Lourdes, Lourdes's sixteen-year-old daughter Jessica, and the many people whose lives they intersect from the late 1980s through the 1990s. Within three years, Jessica becomes romantically involved with a heroin dealer named Boy George, while her younger brother Cesar makes equally unsavory friends by joining a local gang. Meanwhile, Lourdes's fourteen-year-old niece Coco becomes involved with Cesar and joins Jessica in an exciting lifestyle paid for by their boyfriend's criminal activities. Ultimately, both young women wind up on the street after their boyfriends wind up behind bars and attempt to patch together lives from the dregs of society. In addition to being sexually molested and sent to jail, Coco has five children on the way to her twenties, two by Cesar and three by men she met while Coco was in prison.

Achievements

• Adrian LeBlanc is best known as a writer and journalist. Besides, she is a holder of several awards and honors, including a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe, a MacDowell Colony residency, and the Richard J. Margolis Award in 2000. The Centre on Crime, Communities, and Culture of the Open Society Institute awarded her a 2001 Media Fellowship. LeBlanc also has been a Knight Foundation Fellow at Yale Law School, a Fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, and a MacArthur Fellow in 2006. Other awards involve the Lettre Ulysses Award and the New York Times Best Books of the Year in 2003, and the Borders Original Voices Award for nonfiction.

Works

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  • Random Family

    (This New York Times bestseller intimately depicts urban l...)

    2003

Views

Quotations: "The discomforts are sometimes feints. The best stand-ups are setting up traps, and I regularly fall for them! I personally tend to get upset around the class and feminist provocations and am so grateful for every one of them."

"I obsess over the first paragraph for days. It almost always gets cut, or moved around and becomes the end of a section."