Kovetz, Lisa Beth

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KOVETZ, Lisa Beth

PERSONAL:

Born in Brooklyn, NY; married Eldad Tarmu (a jazz musician); children: two sons. Education: Graduated from Smith College.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA. E-mail—lbkovetz@yahoo.com.

CAREER:

Writer and stand-up comic. Music producer, including "Jazz, Baby," a jazz series for children.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Award of Excellence, Film Advisory Board; Pinnacle Book Achievement Award; Kodak Emerging Filmmaker Award.

WRITINGS:

(With J.P. Kovet) Oliver in the Bath/Olivier a la bain (juvenile), Flying South Productions (Englewood, NJ), 2002.

The Tuesday Erotica Club (novel), Sourcebooks (Naperville, IL), 2006.

Also author of play David's Balls, produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

ADAPTATIONS:

Film rights to The Tuesday Erotica Club have been optioned.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lisa Beth Kovetz has worked as a stand-up comic, a playwright, and as a producer of children's media. Her play David's Balls has been translated into Romanian and had a lengthy run in Bucharest. Her first novel, The Tuesday Erotica Club, was praised by Maria Hatton in Booklist as a "sometimes raunchy but always entertaining" story of four law-firm employees who meet to share erotic stories. The group begins as a club of some forty people, who use their lunch breaks to share their private writing efforts. Eventually a splinter group forms, consisting of Aimee, Lux, Brooke, and Margot. Aimee is pregnant and trapped in a failing marriage; Brook is Aimee's friend, who works full-time and has had a steady relationship with her boyfriend for twenty years; Margot, the eldest in the group, is successful but lonely; and Lux is a secretary who sees the group as a way to learn things from the other women, things that may help her in her struggle to escape her desolate neighborhood. Lux is the main character in this novel, and she "undergoes the most complex transformation" by the story's end, according to a Kirkus Reviews writer. A Publishers Weekly writer commented that Lux, "strong and sympathetic … deserves a novel all to herself." Yet all the women in the group are changed by their participation in it, and Kovetz shows real sensitivity to both male and female characters, according to Jane Jorgenson. Reviewing the book in Library Journal, Jorgenson noted that the author "allows them their problems and faults without forcing the reader to wallow in them."