Anthony Flacco

A New York Times and International Bestselling author, Anthony Flacco was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, one of four brothers. Their father was an Air Force pilot and mother was a talented artist and painter. His background as a trained stage actor with over 2,000 performances under his Actors Equity membership provides the primary basis for his critically acclaimed ability to empathize with a wide cross-section of personalities. He moved into screenwriting when he was selected for the prestigious American Film Institute fellowship in Screenwriting and received his MFA in screenwriting there in 1990 after winning AFI's Paramount Studios Fellowship Award for his film script, The Frog's Legacy. He was then selected out of 2,000 entrants for the Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship and spent a year writing for the Touchstone Pictures division. His screenwriting experience drives narrative stories that are visually compelling, whether for a movie theater or the screen of a reader's imagination. His latest historical thriller series is with Severn River is a reissue of the first highly acclaimed Nightingale series. Books 3 and 4 will be published in 2022-23. In 1994, his first nonfiction book, A Checklist for Murder, was acquired in auction by Dell Books as a mass market paperback and turned in solid sales. Anthony then adapted his book into a screenplay for a two-hour television movie script and sold it to NBC Studios for a movie of the week. For the next several years, he worked as a freelance script doctor and story editor. During that time, Anthony was hired by the Discovery Channel to write a two-hour documentary entitled Deadly Spree, and his true crime writing was also featured on a one-hour episode of The Prosecutors for Court TV. Anthony served as a national Judge for the Illinois Arts Council, writing individual evaluations for over 100 screenplays for their 2003 Writing Awards. In 2005, with the publication of his nonfiction book Tiny Dancer (St. Martin's Press) the book was selected by Reader's Digest as their Editor's Choice for August 2005 -- which was their 1,000th Commemorative Issue. The book has been internationally acclaimed, and the Kansas City Star named Tiny Dancer "one of the 100 Most Noteworthy Books of 2005." In 2007, the book received Best Seller status in Italy and continues to be popular there with over 300,000 copies sold in that one country. Back in the U.S., his first two novels of historical fiction are from Ballantine at Random House. The first book, The Last Nightingale, was released in June of 2007 and was one of five nominees for "Best Original Paperback" from the International Thriller Writers Association. The second book, The Hidden Man, published in June of 2008 and created widespread interest in his historical writing within the publishing community. In November of 2009 his historical true crime book was released by Sterling Publishing -- The Road Out of Hell: The True Story of Sanford Clark and the Wineville Murders. It won the USA NEWS 2009 Best True Crime Book of the Year. Publish Your Nonfiction Book (Writer's Digest Books), which Anthony co-authored with literary manager, Sharlene Martin, was also published in 2009. He wrote NY Times Bestseller, Impossible Odds: The Kidnapping of Jessica Buchanan and Her Dramatic Release by SEAL Team Six published on May 14, 2013 with Atria Books/Simon and Schuster which won the 2013 USA NEWS Best Memoir of the Year. It was optioned by Warner Bros. Studios for Clint Eastwood. His historical novel, In the Matter of Nikola Tesla: A Romance of the Mind, has been published in the U.S, Italy as "L'Ultimo Segreto di Tesla"," Russia and Estonia. He is the co-author of TAKING MY LIFE BACK (Revell/Baker, April 2017) with Rebekah Gregory. In 2022, Severn River Publishing released Anthony's NIGHTINGALE DETECTIVES SERIES: 1. The Last Nightingale 2. The Hidden Man 3. Vengeance For All Things 4. Gold in Peace, Iron in War He is an experienced public speaker and frequently gives seminars on writing and is a featured speaker for writers conferences and clubs. He lives in the Seattle area with his wife, Sharlene Martin. For more information, see www.AnthonyFlacco.com