About

Heidi Mastrogiovanni is a dedicated animal welfare advocate who lives in Los Angeles with her musician husband and their rescued senior dogs. She loves to read, hike, travel, and do a classic spit-take whenever something is really funny. Heidi is fluent in German and French, though she doesn’t understand why both those languages feel they need more than one definite article.

Heidi is a graduate of Wesleyan University. She is a co-host of the Movies Not Movies comedy podcast with James Napoli (The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm). Heidi loves contributing book reviews and articles to the Washington Independent Review of Books and the New York Journal of Books. Because what’s better than books and words and stories and stuff? Nothing, that’s what.

Heidi loved living in New York City for sixteen years after college, and she loves living in Los Angeles now because, “Let’s be frank, the weather is gorgeous here. I mean, crazy gorgeous.”

Heidi has traveled extensively in Europe, and studied in Heidelberg for a semester as an undergraduate. “The word ‘studying’ should really have quotation marks around it,” Heidi confesses, “unless drinking huge amounts of beer and flirting outrageously in slurred German count as studying. Which, in a sense, I guess they do, because is there really a better way to learn a language?”

Thanks to the years spent in Manhattan, Heidi is a dedicated walker, with the philosophy that no trek is too great to be mastered and savored. “And that’s kind of a metaphor for life, don’t you think,” Heidi has often been heard to pant when hoofing it for distances that any native to Southern California might dub utterly absurd by any reasonable standard.

Along with accomplished comedy writers Cristina Negrón (who created the series) and Deb Martin, Heidi is thrilled to be part of the triumvirate creating The Classics Slacker Reads… series (“The Classics Slacker…reading the classics so you don’t have to.”).