About
Mark Gozonsky is a writer in Los Angeles with a long career as an essayist, journalist, and high school English teacher. He regularly contributes lifestyle features to the Los Angeles Times and has published three essays in The Sun. His work appears in Best American Sports Writing, The Literary Review, The Santa Monica Review, and many other publications. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.
Some of Mark’s favorite authors include Cervantes, William Least-Heat Moon, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Mark likes to write about lessons learned from the imperfect outcomes of good intentions. He is on a quest to play tennis on every public tennis court in Los Angeles County, and shares reviews and reflections at FreePublicTennisCourts.com.
Mark was awarded an Inspirational Teacher Award from the United Way of Los Angeles for his excellence in teaching high school English. He is a member of the Author’s Guild, PEN America, and the Community of Writers. When he is not writing, Mark enjoys gardening, learning Ukrainian, and making steady progress as a self-taught drummer.
Featured Work
The Gift is to the Giver: Chronicles of a 21st-Century Decade
Mark Gozonsky's first collection of writings focuses on the problem of being a mostly-happy person in a manifestly unfair and troubling world. How to align the inner pep with the external bleakness? Marko explores this question in the context of his personal passions: calibrating athleticism and age; teaching high school English unconventionally to put it mildly; attempting to undo the damage his best intentions cause his big-by-Los Angeles-standards garden. Do these pieces -- some published in The New York Times, The Sun, Lit Hub, the Best American series; others in litmags both medium-sized and small; still others self-transponding from the Unknown -- do they answer that question of how to reciprocate good fortune? Well, you don't really strike me as the kind of person who reads books for answers per se. The vibe I'm getting is we both like writing that embeds us in the author's brain pan, wherein we can wriggle with the zip and zing of each synapse as they make their realizations and inferences and cross-reference them all with song lyrics and things we have read and done and felt. Process, not product. Questions leading to more questions. Journey as destination. I'm here for you.
