Born in Hungary after the Second World War, Fogarassy passed through Austria with her refugee family and grew up in the industrial northwest region of Indiana.
With a Comparative Literature degree from Indiana University, she began her career at Scholastic Magazines in New York. From there, she branched into literary fiction, journalism and commercial writing.
Her first novel was published in 1988; her association with the United Nations began in 1989. She has worked with such notable figures as Margaret Mahler, the child psychiatrist, Robert Gersin, the industrial designer and members of the Trump Organization.
Fogarassy plays with big ideas in her work, which embraces both the experimentation of expression and the recognition of needed conventions for communicating. The meeting of cultures and cultural evolution from tradition to innovation are pet themes. Of special interest are:
- the 2008 United States electoral transition
- the cracking of glass ceilings of gender and race in the 2008 US election
- the fall of the Iron Curtain and its global aftermath
- the 1994 Somalia intervention
Fogarassy is a member of:
– and is listed in Who’s Who and other biographical publications.
She is married to Bronx criminal defense attorney Robert Hamilton Johnston. Two feline family members are a sleek, black male named Shugs and a fluffy, black-and-white female named Toots.
Career
Fogarassy’s career path reflects the versatility that rapid change demands. When opportunity knocked, she responded by learning.
The early experience of serially perceiving life through the complex languages of Hungarian, German and English drove her to communicate and interact. She moved quickly into the outer world with chores-for-hire until old enough to take on her first formal job at Lincoln Delicatessen in Gary, Indiana, where she was part of a team filling large food orders for steel workers. As a pre-med student at Indiana University, she worked during vacations as a nurse’s aide at St. Mary Mercy Hospital in the same city. Meanwhile, she found her true calling on the Bloomington campus at Indiana University’s Media Center.
She was firmly grounded in a communications future when she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Comparative Literature. with minors in languages and science. Her first job, however, turned up at Sarkas Tarzian, a southern Indiana factory where she worked on an assembly line testing television tuners.
Moving to New York and finding little application for her degree outside the academic world, she considered the role of literature in the pragmatic industries that attracted her. She began work at Patterson, Flynn and Johnson, an oriental carpet-importer at Park Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. Then a perfect position for her qualifications turned up with Scholastic Magazines.
Fogarassy climbed the editorial ranks at Scholastic with Art and Man, a four-color monthly humanities magazine published under the auspices of the Smithsonian aimed at the high school level. Work included the planning of thematic issues, research, conducting interviews and writing articles as well as teaching guides. Notable figures who inspired her included photo artist, Duane Michaels; collage artist, Romare Bearden; fiber artist, Gayle Wimmer; environmental sculptor, Red Grooms; poet, Nikki Giovanni; and advertising giant, Vance Packard. Other work for Scholastic included contributions to a two-volume media text entitled Mass Communications Arts, with articles such as “Buy Me: Playing the Advertising Game.” She wrote for Scholastic’s Search Magazine on topics ranging from Alaskan history to youth equestrian events.
Fogarassy left Scholastic for the wider horizons of writing fiction. Early failures and near-successes firmed resolve until she broke through with short stories and articles in publications such as Sidewinder, Home Planet News, The Canadian Queen’s Quarterly, Mildred, Portland Monthly and Quality Living.
Funding for the breakthrough period came from the On Paper cooperative she co-founded to provide office services ranging from clerical to writing. Clients included the industrial design firm of Robert Gersin Associates, for whom she wrote proposals and reports on subjects such as a packaging programme for Olde Jamaican products, a General Electric brand repositioning, a Sears logo redesign and a point-of-sale design for Casual Corner. The child psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler was a friend, as well as a client.
Others included the research centers of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute and Yale University, for whom she wrote grants. In 1986, she organized the first filing system for the Trump Organization and the office manual for Gebhardt/Totaro Associates, for whom she also wrote ad copy for projects such as the annual calendar for Connecticut Savings Bank.
Work for smaller clients included writing newspaper features for One East Shoe Repair, a woman-owned shop specializing in custom-fitted high-heeled footwear; lifestyle articles for Hamilton-Fox, a generic national news publisher for the real estate industry; educational fiction for Kendall/Hunt Publishers; ad material for fashion designer Pam Dennis; press material for the Tex Mex restaurant, Lilly Langtry; and correspondence for commercial broker, Igor Koulichkov.
Fogarassy’s literary career was launched with the 1988 publication of her first novel, Mix Bender by Quality Publications of Ohio. Projects after that included a true-crime book on North Carolina felon, Frank Wetzel, convicted for the murder of two State Troopers; a travel script on a tour of China for Silver Squirrel Productions; a news feature on a Hungarian Midwestern parish; advocacy for the Long Island Pine Barrens Society; profiling of commodities traders for Comart; a rewrite of a novel set in Morocco; and co-authorship of screenplays.
On the community activist side, she met with Mayor David Dinkins in his call for views to improve New York City government in 1991. She lobbied for the New York Public Library, both locally and at the state capital in Albany. She worked with the Host Committee of the 1992 Democratic Convention and campaigned with “soapbox speeches” on street corners. She has been involved in the US census since 1990, and has participated regularly in the judicial system as a juror, including a two-year stint as a federal grand juror.
Her association with the United Nations began in 1990 when her bureaucratic skills were recommended for the service of the world organization. In addition to writing on-the-spot press releases of committee meetings as a Press Officer in the UN Department of Public Information, she has worked on the compendious United Nations Yearbook and has served in coordinating capacities.
All those skills came into play when Fogarassy served as a UN Information Officer in 1994 Somalia. As Editor-in-Chief of the UNOSOM Weekly, she routed news from an enclosed compound to UN headquarters and to embassies around the world. She carried out special media projects to promote peace and health with posters and tee-shirts. She delivered daily radio reports to the UN Peacekeeping Bulletin Board, mediated between international and Somali journalists and supervised the Somali-run print shop publishing the daily newspaper, Maanta (also published as Today for international staff).
Fogarassy’s worldview solidified during her nine-month experience in Somalia at a time when apartheid ended in South Africa, and genocide raged in Rwanda and in the Balkans. The infamous O.J. Simpson chase also occurred then. Watching the event on BBC in the Maanta print room, Fogarassy translated between cultures by explaining to Somali men why an American man might flee if suspected of killing his ex-wife.
Her record of the surreal Somalia intervention was published as Mission Improbable: The World Community on a Compound in Somalia. Her view of a Euro-American cultural divide in a global world was set out in The Light of a Destiny Dark, a novel based on her mother’s unpublished 1957 memoir of Hungary under Communism. Her perspective on challenges to a global world was laid out in Midas Maze, a novel about the vast United Nations bureaucracy.
Fogarassy’s advocacy for a peaceful meeting of cultures is ongoing. Using the modern technological tools of communication, alongside the traditional, she continues to entertainingly promote the value of understanding and growth. In fiction and in “Twitter” prose, on subjects from diplomacy to competitive sport, she focuses on the benefits of self-knowledge at the level of the driving human emotions.
