• The Letters
• The Man Who Was Too Nice
• The Real World
• Selected "Tales from Webster's"
• Hear John Shea read at Live at the Writers House #10, September 14, 1998 (RealAudio required)

Editor, "Penn Medicine" and "PennPulse,"
Department of Public Affairs,
University of Pennsylvania Medical Center

Preferred form: fiction

Current projects:
The "Tales from Webster's" -- which are short, often humorous pieces, built around consecutive entries in a dictionary. "Stolen Flight," a literary mystery novel, in which a resourceful investigator tries to uncover the sensational background of a famous poem. Various short stories, including a set of linked stories. Various novel possibilities.

I've been an editor and writer at the University of Pennsylvania since 1985. I started at Penn as a graduate student in English in 1975, and until I received my Ph.D. degree in 1984, I also taught freshman English here.

As a graduate student, I won the Judy Lee Award for playwriting and the William Carlos Williams Award for poetry. One of my stories, "The Letters," was published in "Partisan Review." I also had two stories in "The Twilight Zone Magazine"; one received an honorable mention in an annual series of "the year's best" science fiction and fantasy stories. "The Man Who Was Too Nice," a psycho-ecological fantasy, appeared in "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine." A translated version became the cover story of "Hitchcock"'s German edition! "Columbia," the magazine of Columbia University, published "The Real World." That same story earlier won honorable mention in a competition sponsored by "Writer's Digest." Two of my poems appeared in "Negative Capability" and another in "Sometimes the Cow Kick Your Head," an anthology of light verse. In 1996, "Taking Leave," a one-act play, was produced by Intuitons, a Penn student group.

Jennifer Baldino
Judith Berman
Adele Chatelain
Randall Couch
Diane DiGiacomo
Patricia Green
Andrew McGhie
John Shea
Wendy Washburn
Mark West
Mark Wilhelm
Dilys Winegrad