Marcia Gloster’s latest novel, Voices from a Distant Room, is a story of fate, ancient mysteries and the power of eternal love that spans five millennia. This foray into paranormal romance is the latest in a lifetime of creative expression for Gloster, an author and painter who knew even as a child that she wanted to be an artist.
While in college in 1963, the Los Angeles native spent a summer studying painting at Oskar Kokoschka’s School of Vision in Salzburg, Austria. After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, she set aside her brushes, working in New York and London before returning to Madison Avenue to build a career as an award-winning book designer and art director.
Gloster drew on those experiences for her novel, I Love You Today, the story of a young woman determined to succeed in the male-dominated worlds of publishing and advertising in the mid-1960s. Editor and writer Pamela Fiori called the book, “…a romp through the Mad Men era, told from a woman’s point of view.”
It was while writing her first book, 31 Days: A Memoir of Seduction, which recounts Gloster’s tumultuous affair with a well-known British painter during her summer in Salzburg, that she rediscovered her passion for art.
Her paintings, which make frequent use of intense and vivid colors, are both documentary and intimate. Figures and portraits tend toward sensuality with a sense of intrigue. A member of the National Association of Women Artists and Studio Montclair, Gloster has exhibited her work in New York City, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Gloster has one daughter and lives in New York City and Verona, New Jersey, with her husband, James Ammeen.
