Ira Wood is the author of three novels, The Kitchen Man, Going Public, and Storm Tide, co-authored by Marge Piercy, with whom he has also written So You Want to Write, an award-winning book about the craft of writing fiction and memoirs which is based on their popular course. He has written screenplays for Universal Pictures and his short pieces have been published in ‘Ploughshares’, ‘The St Petersburg Review,’ and the ‘Utne Reader’ among many literary magazines. In 1996 he established the Leapfrog Press, an internationally distributed ‘boutique’ publishing company, which the Boston Globe called “the pulse of what’s hot in the publishing world.” He sold it in 2008.

Ira’s knack for working with writing students to overcome the inner censor, his readings from his own work, and his lectures about the publishing industry, have won exuberant praise all over the country.

While an editor at Leapfrog he specialized in the resurrection of near misses: books that had come close to being published by mainstream New York publishers but lacked a certain something, sometimes just big numbers for the author’s previous books, but that notwithstanding, a compelling beginning, a tighter plot, a selling title, or simply a great marketing campaign and the patience to keep a book in print until it found its audience. With a hand in the marketing of every one of Leapfrog’s books, his small press titles received national media attention, some becoming regional best sellers, BookSense and best-of-the-year picks.

For the past 30 years Ira has made his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a small fishing village celebrated for its oysters, art galleries, and the colony of well known writers, architects, painters and intellectuals who have settled in this rugged outpost near the tip of Cape Cod. Indulging a life-long passion for political involvement, Ira has spent over twenty years in town government, serving for nine years as a selectman—one of a board of five women and men elected  the principal administrative officers of the town.

Ira’s writing tends to reflect his work. His first novel, The Kitchen Man, details the secret life of a gourmet waiter. His second, Going Public, is set in the early years of the burgeoning dot.com industry, while Storm Tide considers the life and loves of a politician in a small New England town (and was edited at Ballantine by Leona Nevler, who many decades before championed the scandalous Peyton Place). He is working on a comic memoir tentatively entitled, Sex, Drugs, Politics, Publishing & Everything Else I Did Instead of Writing: The Painfully Blunt Recollections of a High Maintenance Man, Based on a True Story.

Since 1982 he has been married to the poet and novelist Marge Piercy. They live on four hilly acres of land surrounded by pine and oak forest, midway between the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay.