Mark Axelrod

Mark Axelrod is a Full Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Chapman University, Orange, California. A graduate of both Indiana University and the University of Minnesota, he is the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing, has published four novels, Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994) and is working on a new novel titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, based on the character created by the 19th century Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis. He has also written three collections of short stories titled: “Borges’ Travel,” “Hemingway’s Garage,” “Dante’s Foil & Other Sporting Tales” and “The Apotheosis of Aaron” and has been published in numerous journals including the Iowa, the New Novel Review and the New York Quarterly.

A contributor to the former New York avant-garde magazine, Splash, he was a film reviewer for Vinyle Magazine (Minneapolis) and a music reviewer for Playboy. Among the awards he has won for his fiction include: the Tim McGinnis Award (University of Iowa); Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Fiction Writing, Cassis, France (2); the Maxwell Perkins Awards for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an award for Experiemental Writing (Indiana University). He has also won awards from Western Illinois University for drama and he is currently working on a play dealing with Van Gogh. His critical books include The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortazar (Macmillan, UK , 1999) and Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001). He is working on two new film books titled Mismatch Dissolve: The Adaptive of Postmodern Fiction to Film and Dairy of a Screenplay, the former to be published by Purdue University Press.

He is a practicing screenwriter and has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute. He has written over twenty screenplays and teleplays and his adaptation and co-production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “An Author’s Mother” won awards from the Scottish Association of Filmmakers, the London International Film & Video Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Video do Algarve, Portugal. He is currently working on a project with the Chilean director, Silvio Caiozzi, whose film Coronacion was short-listed for the 2001 Academy Awards.