Jack R. Stanley

Jack R. Stanley is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. As an officer and combat photographer in Vietnam, he earned the Bronze Star. Yet he says, “When you’re in a firefight and everybody else on both sides have guns while you have a camera --- you get to change your pants a lot.”

After his military service, he received both his M.A. and his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in Radio-TV-Film. His doctoral dissertation was on the long-running TV series GUNSMOKE. Stanley also received two of Michiganıs most prestigious creative writing awards, The Hopwood Award, one for a one-act play and the second for a novel.

Still married to his gifted high school sweetheart, Stanley’s first academic position was TV Area Head at The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Radio-TV-Film. He later moved to deep-south Texas and the Lower Rio Grande Valley for a challenging position with The University of Texas-Pan American. Here he taught Theatre-TV-Film for 30 years in the Department of Communication serving as Department Chair at U.T.P.A. for 11 years. He did take one year out to work for The University of Alaska Anchorage as a visiting professor. Back in Texas, Stanley directed for the stage at The University Theatre, produced and directed fifteen student-staffed, cast, and crewed feature films, writing most of the original screenplays. Just a few of his credits are available on IMDB.com.

He now lives in the Texas Panhandle where he writes his fiction and runs his blog, www.TheFictionWritersNotebook.com. His webpage is http://www.jackrstanley.com.