George Michelsen Foy (aka Georges Foy, George Foy and GF Michelsen) is a Franco-American author and essayist, a professor of creative writing, and former mariner. His latest novel, The Last Green Light, about the forgotten people of Gatsby’s Gilded Age world, will be published May 1, 2024 (see page listed in ‘About’). His latest non-fiction book, Run the Storm, an account of the mysterious disappearance of SS El Faro in 2015, was published by Scribner on Mayday, 2018.
More detailed biography
Foy’s previous non-fiction book, Finding North: How navigation makes us human (Flatiron / Macmillan US, 2016), explores how all life finds its way around, partly through the prism of his own family of star-crossed mariners. He is the author of thirteen published novels: the latest, titled Enquête sur Kamanzi, was published by Éditions Globophile (Paris) in 2018. Mettle, 2010, was published under "GF Michelsen" at University Press of New England; others at Bantam Doubleday, Viking Penguin, and Bastei Lubbe (Germany)—please see the novels page. He was a prize-winner in the Ep;phany Journal short-fiction contest, in the F(r)ictionMagazine fiction contest, the Cutthroat Journal contest, and the Joe Gouveia Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy in 2016. His long-form non-fiction has been published in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Poets & Writers, et al; short fiction with Ep;phany Journal, Monkey Bicycle, Apeiron, Notre Dame Review, American Literary Review, Washington Square Review, et al. A non-fiction book on silence (Zero Decibels, Scribner) came out in 2011. In an earlier life, Foy worked as a mate on British tramp freighters in the North Sea, and ran a commercial fishing boat out of Cape Cod; he currently holds a US Coast Guard coastal captain’s license. Foy, who was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, lives on the Cape and New York, teaches creative writing at NYU, and once, while under the influence of strong drink, walked backwards through the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland.
““[Foy is] a storyteller who, like Conrad, can compress into a tale you can’t put down all the complexities of a time and place” ”
— Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature
