Featured Mentor: Mark Dunn

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Mark Dunn! Mark is the author of twenty published plays and a dozen eclectic works of book-length fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning classic Ella Minnow Pea, published in a commemorative illustrated edition by Dzanc Books in 2023. Dzanc has also published Mark’s novel We Five. Among his non-fiction books are Zounds! A Browsers Dictionary of Interjections; Quizzing America: Television Game Shows and Pop Culture in the 1950s; and Texas People’s Court: The Fascinating World of the Texas Justice of the Peace. During the pandemic Mark made his new play, The Puzzle with the Piazza available for royalty-free streaming for theatre groups throughout the U.S. It has since been published by Concord Theatricals in acting edition. Mark’s full-length plays Belles, Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain, A Delightful Quarantine, and The Glitter Girls have together received over three-hundred productions throughout the world.

Mark is ready to push some boundaries with his mentees, saying, “I'm happy to be a part of the mentorship program and explore with young writers the many ways we can maintain our own literary visions by breaking some rules, respecting others, and bending a few that have always been very ripe for bending. I like to work with writers who push the boundaries of literary convention but don't alienate the reader. To me, a good writer is one who tells a great story with one arm slung around the shoulder of the receptive reader. It's about the story, but it's also about that conversation with the literary listener.”

Mark really loves his current read, Jonathan Evison's Small World, and admires its “narrative and chronological adventurism.”

Click here to sign up for a mentorship from Mark!

Click here to purchase the 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of Mark’s Classic: Ella Minnow Pea.