Mark Seinfelt

Mark Eric Seinfelt was born on February 27, 1962, in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He attended university and public schools and represented Indiana Area Senior High School at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University in the summer of 1979 where he was enrolled in creative writing. In 1983, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the Pennsylvania State University. He accelerated at Penn State, completing his studies in three years instead of the customary four. A university scholar and honors student in English, he graduated with distinction. His thesis in creative composition, the final requirement in the university scholar honors program, "The Mozart Machine: an excerpt" received the Henry Sams Memorial Award of 1983, the highest honor bestowed on an English Honors thesis at Penn State. As a student at the university, Seinfelt studied under novelist and screenwriter Robert C.S. Downs and critically acclaimed author Paul West, whose awards include the Lannan Prize for Fiction, the Literature Prize of the American Academy, and the designation Chevalier of Arts and Letters from the government of France. Author Thomas Rogers and critic Philip Young sat on the Henry Sams Memorial Award committee judging the honors theses in 1983.

In May of 1987, Seinfelt received a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis where he was the recipient of a three-year tuition scholarship, fellowship, and teaching assistantship; and where he completed the novel "The Mozart Machine." The chairman of his dissertation committee was the noted fiction writer, philosopher, essayist and multiple National Book Circle Award-winner William H. Gass. Seinfelt's was the only creative writing thesis Gass had ever consented to supervise during his years at Washington University. At St. Louis, Seinfelt also studied under Stanley Elkin, Lee K. Abbot, Donald Finkel, Diane Ackerman, Charles Newman, and Pulitzer Prize winning author and United States Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov.

Since receiving his MFA, Seinfelt has completed four more novels "Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town," "Steiglitz's Folly," "Intrusive Voices," and "At Last the Distinguished Thing." His fiction has been featured in "Kalliope" and "Chicxculub." In September 1996, a chapter from his suicide-study-in-progress "Final Drafts" was published in "The Bookpress: The Newspaper of the Literary Arts," a Cornell University publication. "Final Drafts" was Seinfelt's first book to reach publication. Acquired by Prometheus Books, it saw print in December 1999. Prometheus is a commercial press specializing in non-fiction and is the publisher of Steve Allen, Peter Ustinov, Leslie Fiedler, and Jack Kevorkian, among others. On January 16, 2000, Seinfelt was the featured guest on Book Gallery, a nationally syndicated radio talk show. Also that year an entry on Seinfelt appeared in "Contemporary Authors," a reference series that provides information on approximately 112,000 writers in a wide range of media, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. In February 2004, "Final Drafts" was chosen as an alternate selection of The Readers' Subscription Book Club. In 2008, his novel "Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town" was a semi-finalist in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award contest and was subsequently published by the Amazon subsidiary BookSurge/ Create Space. In August 2009 BookSurge/ Create Space also published "Symphonie Fantastique," a collection of his shorter novels.

In May 2010, Seinfelt's novel "Henry Boulanger of Moshannon Town" received a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award from the North American Bookdealers Exchange and will be showcased on NABE's website and at trade book shows beginning in October. For the past twenty-five years, the NABE Pinnacle Awards annually honor top genre books published by independent publishers. In 2008, the book was a semi-finalist in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award contest.

On January 21, 2011, Mark Seinfelt’s new novel "Baldr and Beatrice" was published by CreateSpace. Mark Seinfelt revisits the time-proven formula of girl and boy forever desiring – but never achieving – the culmination of their love in “Baldr and Beatrice”.

Seinfelt is single and presently resides in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, where he serves as a Trustee and Grant Writer for the Philipsburg Historical Foundation and as Secretary for the Committee for a Moshannon Valley Veterans Memorial.

He is an avid reader and sportsman. An amateur pianist, he also enjoys fencing, fishing, hiking, swimming and spelunking.

My website is: www.markseinfelt.com