Damon Norko

 

Damon's newest story, Bodies!, will be in our new science fiction anthology, Somewhere Out There.

 

Currently, I am an English/drama teacher in Maryland.  I became a theater director last year, debuting with Twelfth Night and Curtains! This year I directed a splendid performance of Our Town and I am about to embark on a journey with Cole Porter’s Anything Goes!

 

This theatrical experience has greatly influenced my writing.  I have infused the principles of drama into my work, and am busy writing and adapting plays as well as my fiction.  Last year, I was inspired to write an adolescent theatrical play, My Brother, the God Particle, designed to motivate young people to think about science. This play saw a successful dramatic reading by advanced acting students, and will now be listed for distribution by YES Plays.com.

 

Going back to my earlier career, I sold a couple thousand poetry chapbooks in the 1980s, culminating with two novels Alias Art Mann (1985) and The Glue Story (1990), published by Cherry Valley Editions.  Many people remember me stumping around the MD-DC area with a "Poems for Sale" sign on my back. I split my time between poetry and song-writing for my rock band, The Submensas (1983-1993). Songs from this era can be found at http://thesubmensas.bandcamp.com/

 

Life took hold of me for about a decade; I opened a chess store in downtown Baltimore and didn't write much until the early 2000s. My recent novel, The Delilah Factor (2010), which imagines a future world inhabited only by men, brought me back to the world of writing.

 

My ten latest stories focus on the collision of technology with human nature, asking critical questions of where we, as humans, are headed. Smarties!, the first in the series, appeared in the literary magazine, The Loch Raven Review. http://thelochravenreview.net/damon norko/ . Foodies! was published Kevin Cole’s Annual.  Newbies! and Foodies!  have been published in The Subtopian.com. http://www.subtopian.com/?p=66718