Fowles Center Director: Mark Axelrod

MARK AXELROD is a Professor of Comparative Literature and former Chair of English at Chapman University.  Prior to teaching at Chapman, he taught at the University of East Anglia, (Norwich, UK) and the University of Edinburgh (Scotland).  A graduate of both Indiana University (BA, MA) and the University of Minnesota (PhD), he is also the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing for which he has received 4 National Endowment for the Arts Grants.  He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has written 17 novels, published four, 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 has completed a Pan-Euro-American trilogy titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, based on the character created by the 19th century Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, excerpts of which have been anthologized in The Reading Room/4 published by Great Marsh Press.  He is also completing a tetrology of short fictions, the first of which, Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage (2004,Fiction Collective 2) received excellent reviews in the New York Times, the Georgia Review and Publisher’s Weekly, among others.  The second volume, Balzac’s Coffee, DaVinci’s Ristorante, is completed and he has sketched two new collections, titled Melville’s Motors, Tolstoi’s Train, and Rabelais’ Hotel, Nietzsche’s Café.  He has written other short fiction as well including Dante’s Foil & Other Sporting Tales and The Apotheosis of Aaron.  He has been published in numerous literary journals including the Iowa Review and the New York Quarterly and was a contributor to the former New York avant-garde magazine, Splash.  He was a film reviewer for Vinyl Magazine (Minneapolis) and a one-time 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 Award for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an Award for Experimental Writing (Indiana University).  He has also won an award from Western Illinois University for his play, Ti Amo Lucia Olivetti and has recently completed a trilogy of new one-act plays titled Taxing Tales that includes: VanGogh’s Audit, Superman in America and Bruno Arlt at the Café Grille.  He has also been authorized to adapt John Fowles novel, Mantissa, into a stage play.  He has translated Xavier de Maistre’s novella, Un voyage autour de ma chambre as well as Balzac’s play, Mercadet and Baudelaire’s, La Fanfarlo.  He is currently at work on a book of memoirs titled, Posthumous Papers of a Living Writer which includes essays from Beckett to Garrison Keillor, Letterman to August Wilson.  His critical books include, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortázar (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1990); The Poetics of Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1999). Other film books include: Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001); Character & Conflict: Cornerstones of Screenwriting (Heinemann, 2004); and I Read It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation (Heinemann, 2006).  A fourth book titled, The Scene and How to Write It will be published by Focus in 2010.  In 2005, he was a guest professor of Creative Writing-Fiction at Pomona College, Claremont, CA and was invited to return in Spring, 2006.  In June 2005, he was invited to teach at the 65th Annual Indiana University Writers Conference in Bloomington.  In November, 2008 he has been invited to speak at FILBA, the 1st International Literary Festival to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A member of CILECT and other film organizations, he is a practicing screenwriter and has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; 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 has taught or conducted screenwriting seminars and workshops throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United Kingdom as well as the United States including stints at: the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba [the school founded by García Márquez]; the Goethe Institute, Santiago, Chile (with Antonio Skármeta [author of Il Postino]); with both SICA, the Cinematographer’s Union of Argentina, and Proyectos Culturales in Buenos Aires; at the National Film School of Denmark, Copenhagen [with Mogens Rukov (screenwriter of Celebration]); the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland; the Grimme Akadamie, Cologne; the Flemish Film Academy, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium; PILOTS, Barcelona, Spain; Edinburgh University, Scotland; the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires; the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; Columbia College, Chicago; Independent Features North, Minneapolis; Western Washington University, Bellingham; Elmira College, Elmira, NY; Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Paris Writers Workshop, Paris.  For four years, he has been a regular visiting adjunct professor of screenwriting at the Hamburg Media School, Hamburg, Germany.  In spring, 2002, he was honored as a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing-Screenwriting at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA and was a featured speaker at the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series at San Diego State University in October, 2003.  In May, 2006, he was invited by the United States Embassy, Berlin to speak on screenwriting and to conduct screenwriting lectures at a number of German universities.  In August, 2006 he gave some lectures at UNIACC in Santiago, Chile and was invited by the US Embassy in Santiago and in Buenos Aires to give film lectures there.  In addition, he has been invited to conduct screenwriting lectures at the John Huston School of Film and Digital Media, Galway, Ireland as well as at the Baltic Film School, Tallinn University, Estonia, UIAH, Helsinki, Finland, Black Coffee Films, Mumbai, India.  In September, 2008 he was invited to give a lecture and conduct workshops at the 3rd Annual Ibermedia Conference in Santiago, Chile.