Biographies
Dr. Valerie Allen
Psychologist and author, has published a children's book, Summer School for Smarties, for grades 3 through 6. Her next book in this series is Bad Hair, Good Hat, Best Friends which will be published in Fall 2009.
She is also the author of two novels, Suffer the Little Children and Sins of the Father, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of these books is donated to domestic shelters.
She presents a variety of writers' workshops including: the art of writing magazine articles, writing for children, and fundamentals of being a successful author, based on her book, Write, Publish, Sell! Quick, Easy, Inexpensive Ideas for the Marketing Challenged.
She is a member of the Space Coast Writers Guild, the Brevard Author's Book Fair, and the National League of American PEN Women.
Dr. Terry Cronin
Terry Cronin, Jr. M.D. is an independent filmmaker who first traveled the film festival circuit with his short horror film, Under the Bridge, which called attention to the plight of the homeless living beneath the Melbourne causeway. He is a co-founder of the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers Festival which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. In 2004, he began publishing Students of the Unusual, a horror adventure comic series. He was honored to be the subject of a documentary on the Independent Film Channel called "The Comic-con Chronicles". For more information go to www.3boysproductions.com or www.studentsoftheunusual.com
Marcia Denius
She has been teaching writing courses at Florida Tech since 1992. She received her BA from UF , her MA from UCF, and her MFA from Vermont College. She loves teaching, and she loves to write poems. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Florida English, Dogwood Review, Florida Review, The English Journal, and Western Journal of Medicine, among others. Last spring, her first book of poems, Sweet Surrender, was published.
She regularly presents papers at the Florida College English Association's annual meetings, and in 2006 she was an invited participant at the Oxford Round Table, University of Oxford, England.
Currently, she is the faculty advisor for Florida Tech's literary journal, Kaleidoscope.
Heather Elko
Teaches English at Brevard Community College, Palm Bay Campus. She earned her M.A. at Florida Atlantic University, under the guidance of award-winning poet Susan Mitchell, and has attended Key West Writers workshops with John Ashbery and Martin Espada. She is a contributor to Who's Who in Twentieth Century World Poetry (Routledge). Her poems have been published in Lullwater Review, Grasslands Review, The Listening Eye, and anthologies published by the Space Coast Poetry Club and the National Association of State Poetry Societies. She has presented poetry-writing workshops at conferences of the Florida Writers Association and the Florida State Poets Association. Ms. Elko also serves as a poetry contest judge for a national creative writing newsletter.
Anna Flowers
Published author of 4 true-crime books, Anna Flowers has focused on Florida in particular for many of her works. Blind Fury: The comprehensive study of serial killer Gerald Stano, who confessed to killing 41 women in Central Florida during the 70's. It was a lead title for Doubleday True Crime Book Club and is now in a fifth printing. Bound to Die: The case of Tampa Bay serial killer, Bobby Joe Long, is a classic in task force team work and forensic detection. A Doubleday Mystery Guild Book Club selection, it is a Medical Detective segment, "Thread of Evidence," seen on TLC and Discovery TV channels. Murder at Wayside Antiques: A story about a double homicide north of Ocala, FL. Louis Wesley Barnes, world class thief fenced treasures in Las Vegas while Marion County FL detectives continued for three years to track him down. Her latest book is Wanton Woman: a true crime saga of the 1930-
1940s era in a small, virtually lawless town in South Carolina.
Dr. Jason Harris
(Ph.D. 2001, M.A. 1997 University of Washington; B.A. 1995 University of California at Santa Barbara-The College of Creative Studies):
Dr. Harris is an Assistant Professor at Florida Tech and a writer of folklore, literary criticism, narrative prose, poetry, and screenplays.
He is the author of Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, the coauthor of The Troll Tale and Other Scary Stories, and the editor of Laugh Without Guilt: A Clean Jokebook. Finalist Glimmertrain Very Short Fiction Award 2003. Third Prize winner in tenth annual (2003) Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Contest at California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Third Prize for Screenplay, Script Category--Focus on Writers Contest, Sacramento, CA 2002. jasonmarcharris.com
David Johansson
David Johansson was a British Council delegate at Oxford and Cambridge. A Fellow at the Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, his article, "Homeward Bound," was collected in Reading the Sopranos (I.B. Tauris, 2006). Johansson has lectured on literature at Tulane and Princeton; the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and Lund University, Sweden. In the 1990's he interviewed refugees from the war in Bosnia, writing for Florida Today newspaper and the Orlando Sentinel. Skin of Sunset (Squire Press, 2009) is his first novel.
Dr. John Lavelle
Dr. John Lavelle received his Ph. D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA. his M. A. in creative writing from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Fl another M. A. and B.A. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY graduating Cum Laude His short stories Bo" and "Like Tea" were published in Y2K Magazine. "Milos and Phoebe." Was published in The Cypress Dome 11 (Spring 2001): 92-97. "Little Sacrifices" was published in the Southwestern Review (2005): 22-32. "Buddy's" was published in the Pisgah Review. 1.2 (Winter 2006). "Dragon Flies" was published in the Stone Canoe 1 3, (January 2009) and "Living in the Past" will appear in the anthology Of a Certain Age: Voices of Experience scheduled to go to press in February 2009. "Girls Loving" was nominated for AWP Intro Award in 2000. "Little Sacrifices" was a finalist in New Letters Fiction Award, 2003. "Norris Gets Himself a Present" was long listed for the Fish Publishing Fiction Awards, Dublin, Ireland in 2004.
John Lavelle was also the proofreader for The Current Debate About the Irish Literary Canon: Essays Reassessing The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Ed. Dr. Helen Thompson. Queenston: Edwin Melon Press 2006, editor for the Southwestern Review, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's graduate literary journal and a reader for The Kiosk, the graduate literary magazine, SUNY at Buffalo.
Judith Mammay
Before moving to Florida and beginning her second career as a children's book writer, Judith Mammay was an exceptional education teacher in an inner-city school in New Hampshire, where she gained much of the inspiration for her books. She has two published books, It's Time, an early reader about a young boy with autism, and a mid-grade book, Knowing Joseph, also about autism, with a third, Ryan's Victory, due for release in fall 2009. She has also had articles published in The Autism Perspective (TAP) magazine.
She is a graduate of the Institute of Children's Literature (ICL) and has attended the Highlights Writers' Workshop in Chautauqua. She is active in the Space Coast Writers' Guild (SCWG) and the Society for Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and is available for school visits and writing worshops. Contact her through her website at www.judithmammay.com.
Martha Powers
Martha Powers has published fourteen popular fiction novels. A misguided history and geography major with a preference for violence over the cerebral, she moved from writing historical fiction to psychological suspense thrillers.
Dr. Edmund Skellings
Dr. Edmund Skellings was appointed a University Professor of Humanities at the Florida Institute of Technology in 2008. He divides his time writing poetry and promoting programs in the humanities.
Born in Ludlow, Massachusetts, in 1932, Skellings graduated with English honors from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his doctorate in English from the University of Iowa, where he taught prosody and metrics in the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop. He published the first record-book, Duels and Duets, whose covers contained vinyl recording of the poet's voice. In 1963, he founded the Alaska Writer's Workshop at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
In 1967, Skellings joined the faculty of Florida Atlantic University where he taught Understanding Poetry and Shakespeare. In 1973, Skellings became Director of the International Institute of Creative Communication at Florida International University which brought poetry programs to over 100,000 children.
After a competition of 400 Florida poets, in 1980, Governor Robert Graham appointed Skellings the Poet Laureate of the State of Florida, a lifetime honor. Author of 7 books of poems, his most recent is Collected Poems 1958-1989, published by the University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
In 1990, Skellings became the founding Director of the Florida Center for Electronic Communication where he developed the first Master of Fine Arts degree in Computer Arts at a public university in Southeast United States. He is well known for his award winning animated computer poems, and in 2002, won the Videographer Crystal Award of Excellence for his video disc Word Songs, the first collection of 3D animated poetry in the world.
Dr. Robert L. Shearer
Robert L. Shearer received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music, a Master of Music degree (in musicology) and the Ph.D. in philosophy all from Florida State University. He has taught there and at the University of Tampa, coming to Florida Tech in 1981 to teach courses in Western Civilization, Music, Philosophy, and Logic. He has published poetry in The Florida Review and Inkwell, and in 2003 won the Florida Conference of Historians' Thomas M. Campbell Award for Best Paper submitted to their Annual Proceedings.
Dr. Shearer's area of specialty in philosophy included the study of aesthetics under the phenomenological aesthetician Eugene F. Kaelin. His dissertation, A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Value in Music, was acquired recently by the Jacksonville Public Library for the work's treatment of the music of Frederick Delius.
Dr. Shearer self-published his novel The Beethoven Years in 2008. Based on an account by the actor James Woods about his having known a schizophrenic who took himself to be Beethoven, and who, after his illness was under control, told Woods his period of madness was the happiest in his life, the novel is a creative interpolation of that man's story, with a musicological twist serving as a plot.
Dr. Robert A. Taylor
Dr. Robert A. Taylor is Professor of History and Head of the Humanities and Communication Department here at Florida Tech. He received a Ph.D. in American History from the Florida State University in 1991. The author or editor of seven books, Taylor's latest publication is Florida: An Illustrated History (2006). One of these, This War So Horrible: The Diary of Hiram Smith Williams, was a History Book Club Selection in 1993 and a Lincoln Prize nominee. His work has appeared in journals like The Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Southern Studies, and the Florida Historical Quarterly. He has been a Florida Tech faculty member since 1997.
Taylor is the current President Emeritus of the Florida Historical Society, and a former member of the Board of Directors for the Rosetter Trust. His government service includes terms on the Brevard County Historical Commission and as a Brevard County board member with the Selective Service System.
Professor Taylor has been an observer of Florida history, society and politics for a number of years. He has published op-ed pieces in newspapers like Florida Today and the Orlando Sentinel, and frequently comments on Florida issues in the Palm Beach Post. He has an on-going interest in the history of the Sunshine State and is currently working on a short biography of Governor Dan T. McCarty. He also plans to do a study of U.S. Presidents have interacted with Florida from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush.
Dr. Angela Tenga
Angela Tenga received her Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1993. Before coming to Florida Tech, she was a professional writer and taught English as a second language in Germany. She currently teaches courses that focus on literature, history, and writing.