About Mystery Crime Writer Lisa Cotoggio

MYSTERY CRIME WRITER LISA COTOGGIO, a Queens Author and native New Yorker, began writing after spending an intensive year of study at The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she learned how to get inside a character’s head.

The first to admit, she’s never taken a writing class in her life, Lisa Cotoggio attributes her recent success to years of hard work and reading. As a young girl, Lisa Cotoggio would spend many of her afternoons in the Poppenhusen Library in College Point, where she was raised, reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The rest of her free time was spent playing softball, running track, and racing go-karts at Adventures Inn amusement park in Flushing.

Then in 1977, Lisa Cotoggio saw her first dead body, when one of a dozen inmates who escaped under the cover of darkness from Rikers Island, washed up on the shores of MacNeil Park in College Point. A haunting memory, so vivid, it would serve as a harbinger to what Lisa Cotoggio hopes will become a fruitful career writing police procedurals and NYPD based novels set amongst the backdrop of College Point, Cresthaven, Malba, Whitestone, Powells Cove, Beechhurst, Flushing and Bayside.

Lisa Cotoggio currently resides in Queens. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime.

Lisa Cotoggio