Ed Falco

Ed Falco's latest book is the poetry collection, X in the Tickseed (LSU, 2024). His previous books include a second poetry collection, Wolf Moon Blood Moon (LSU, 2017), and the novels Transcendent Gardening (C&R Press, 2022), Toughs (Unbridled Books, 2014) and The Family Corleone (Grand Central, 2012). The Family Corleone was developed from a screenplay by Mario Puzo, spent several weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, and has been published in twenty-one foreign editions. His most recent short story collection is Burning Man (SMU, 2011). His previous short story collections are Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled Books, 2005), Acid (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), and Plato at Scratch Daniel's and Other Stories (University of Arkansas Press, 1990). Acid won the 1995 Richard Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame and was a finalist for The Patterson Prize. He has won a number of other prizes and awards for his writing, including an NEA Fellowship in fiction, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction from The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review, The Mishima Prize for Innovative Fiction from The Saint Andrews Review, a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, two Individual Artist's Fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and The Governor's Award for the Screenplay from The Virginia Festival of American Film. Judges for the Governor's Award were Robert Cort, Barry Levinson, and Stephen Spielberg. He is also the author of four other novels: Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Unbridled Books, 2009), Wolf Point (Unbridled Books, 2005), A Dream with Demons (Eastgate Systems, 1997), and Winter in Florida (Soho, 1990), as well as a collection of literary and experimental short fictions, In the Park of Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and a collection of hypertext short fictions, Sea Island (Eastgate Systems, 1995). His stories have been published widely in journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and TriQuarterly, and collected in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and several anthologies, including, Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium. An early innovator in the field of digital writing, Ed is the founding editor of The New River: a Journal of Digital Writing and Art. His literary and experimental hypertexts include Self-Portrait as Child w/Father (Iowa Review Web), Circa 1967-1968 (Eastgate Reading Room), "Charmin' Cleary" (Eastgate Reading Room), and "Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales" (with photographer Mary Pinto, in Volume I of the Electronic Literature Collection. As a playwright, Falco is the author of Home Delivery, which won the Hampden-Sydney Playwriting Award and was subsequently staged by the Hampden-Sydney Theater Department. Earlier versions of the play were given staged readings in Mill Mountain Theater's Centerpiece and Theater B reading series. Two plays, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha and Radon, premiered in university productions at Virginia Tech. In the summer of 2001, Falco worked with artists and actors from the United States, England, Greece, Bosnia, and Germany in an international theatre project meant to explore the healing power of drama. Scenes from The Cretans, a play developed during the project, were presented for a small audience in an amphitheatre on the Aegean in the village of Kolympari, Crete. The completed play—a reimagining of the mythology surrounding the birth of the Minotaur, based on a surviving fragment from Euripides’ play of the same name—was produced as a radio play/podcast by the Virginia Tech Theatre Department in 2021. Other plays include, The Center and Possum Dreams, the latter of which was read at Urban Stages in New York, directed by Connie Grappo of the Working Theater, before being produced in 2014 by None Too Fragile Theatre in Akron, Ohio, and later in New York, at Theatre 54, Shetler Studios, directed by Sean Derry. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ranked Possum Dreams as one of “the ten best plays of 2014 on Cleveland stages.”