Edward Falco

Falco has three new books of fiction forthcoming in 2005: In the Park of Culture, a collection of short fictions from The University of Notre Dame Press; Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories, from Unbridled Books; and Wolf Point, a novel, also from Unbridled. His earlier books include the novel Winter in Florida (Soho, 1990), the hypertext novel, A Dream with Demons (Eastgate Systems, 1997), the hypertext poetry collection, Sea Island (Eastgate Systems, 1995), and a chapbook of prose poem, Concert in the Park of Culture (Tamarack, 1985), as well as two collections of short stories:  Acid (Notre Dame, 1996) and Plato at Scratch Daniel's & 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 fiction, including the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction from The Virginia Quarterly 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.  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, most recently, Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium.

As a playwright, Falco is the author of Home Delivery, which won the Hampden-Sydney Playwriting Award in 1992, 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 recent plays, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha and Radon, premiered in university productions at Virginia Tech.  Both were directed by David Johnson.  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 begun during the project, were presented for a small audience in an amphitheatre on the Aegean in the village of Kolympari, Crete.  His most recent plays are Welcome to Castle in the Air, and Possum Dreams, the latter of which was included in Ensemble Studio Theater’s Octoberfest 2004.

Ed Falco lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he teaches writing and literature at Virginia Tech’s MFA program, and edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing.