About the Author

Anthony’s background as a trained stage actor with over 2,000 performances under his Actors Equity membership provides the primary basis for his critically acclaimed ability to empathize with a wide cross-section of personalities. His screenwriting experience is also of great use in telling narrative stories that are visually compelling, whether for the “screen” of a reader’s imagination or the screen of a theatre or at home.

He was selected for the prestigious American Film Institute fellowship in Screenwriting, and received his MFA in writing there in 1990 after winning AFI’s Paramount Studios Fellowship Award for his script, The Frog's Legacy. He was then selected out of 2,000 entrants for the Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship, and spent a year writing for the Touchstone Pictures division.
 
His first nonfiction book, A Checklist for Murder, was acquired in auction by Dell Books as a mass market paperback and turned in solid sales.  Anthony adapted his book as a two-hour television movie script and sold it to NBC Studios for a movie of the week.  For the next several years, he worked as a freelance script doctor and story editor.

 Anthony was hired by the Discovery Channel to write a two-hour documentary entitled Deadly Spree, based on a true story.  His true crime writing was also featured on a one-hour episode of The Prosecutors for Court TV.

In addition to his own writing, Anthony has served as a freelance editor for books and book proposals that have recently sold to Hay House, Vanderwyck & Burnham, Rodale Press, and Lyons Press.  He has also written book proposals for other authors who have gone on to garner publication contracts with Rodale Press, Random House, and St. Martin’s Press.

His nonfiction book Tiny Dancer St. Martin’s Press was selected by Reader’s Digest as their Editor’s Choice for August, 2005 -- their 1,000th Commemorative Issue.  The book has been internationally acclaimed, and as of 2007, received Best Seller status in Italy.  Kansas City Star named Tiny Dancer “one of the 100 Most Noteworthy Books of 2005.” 

Anthony also edited the first two manuscripts for a new series of humorous books written by gay and straight couples, called E-Musings, which have sold to Marabout for French translation.

Anthony’s first two novels of historical fiction are from Mortalis Books at Ballantine/Random House.  The first, The Last Nightingale, was released in June of 2007, with the second, The Hidden Man, published in June of 2008.

His two newest books are "The Road Out Of Hell" from Sterling Publishing in November of 2009, and "Publish Your Nonfiction Book" from Writers Digest, also in November of 2009.

An experienced public speaker, Anthony frequently gives seminars on crime writing (brief syllabus available).  He is a featured speaker on writing for writers conferences and clubs.

Asked about his philosophy of work, Anthony wrote:
With my screenwriting background, I make it a point to write in strongly visual terms. I do this to aid in establishing the most important part of any storytelling endeavor: getting into the heart and mind of the central characters.  Even the most diverse personalities will share various common traits, and those traits can be the keys for creating strong characters on the page, as well as for placing powerful images into the imaginations of the readers. 

The Who, What, When, and Where of a story are covered in the journalistic approach.  But I believe that it is always in the Why of any person’s behavior that we uncover a mother lode of fascinating twists and turns in human personality.  Popular culture bombards us with reasons to become quick and harsh judges of others, of ourselves, but it is so much more satisfying to understand.

Working in fiction or nonfiction books and book proposals, I focus on stories that make genuine and powerful statements about the positive side of human nature.  Today’s trend in much public writing tends toward nihilistic reportage posed as enlightened realism, but I believe that it is more often the product of cable news mentalities who are writing for ratings on a 24-hour news cycle.  There is a more deeply considered reality that is just as valid. Reaching it often means delving long and hard into very dark places, in order to understand the story’s conflict.  But I am only interested in pursuing stories with an honest and compelling expression of hope for the reader – not a manufactured sentiment, but an imparted sense of fulfillment at the end.  Literary expressions of despair are an easy way for a writer to affect a worldly appearance, but I see such points of view as failures of insight generated by writers with unbalanced life experience.

 

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