Biography of Jason J. Marchi
For free-use publication
JASON J. MARCHI made his first professional sale, a poem, to Amazing Stories in 1988. Since then he has sold over 800 articles, stories, poems, and essays to magazines and newspapers, and received over a dozen writing awards; most recently from Mom’s Choice Awards®, Connecticut Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Shoreline Arts Alliance/Tassy Walden Awards for Children’s Literature.
In November 2010 Jason's first collection of poems, Ode on a Martian Urn, was published as a trade paperback book, and a year later his first picture storybook, The Legend of Hobbomock: The Sleeping Giant, was published in hardcover. The Legend of Hobbomock has gained steady approval from readers of all ages, and the book continues to be adopted for classroom use in a number of Connecticut elementary schools in social studies and language arts. Hobbomock is also the single best-selling title ever sold at the North Haven, Connecticut Barnes & Noble brick & mortar store.
In 2015 The Legend of Hobbomock was released on CD in PDF format, along with a 98 page PDF teacher/student fun guide for elementary classroom use to match national Core Curriculum requirements, and as an audio book recorded by opera singer and National Public Radio late-night classical music host, Peter van de Graaff.
Jason's second picture storybook, The Growing Sweater, was published in November 2014 and was a Mom’s Choice® Silver Recipient in January 2015. The Growing Sweater first appeared in the 2007 EXPECTATIONS Anthology of Children's Literature published by Braille Institute after the manuscript was a finalist in the 2006 Tassy Walden Awards New Voices of Children's Literature competition.
During the 17 years that Jason worked for McGraw-Hill/Dushkin—a higher education publisher—he developed editorial content for a number of college textbooks in the Wellness Series, which became a Grolier encyclopedia set.
In 1997 Jason founded the not-for-profit New Century Writer Awards contest that operated for six years in close association with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story magazine. As a developmental editor, Jason is also credited with discovering the early literary talents of Joseph Hill (20th Century Ghost, Heart Shaped Box, Horns) when New Century Writer presented Mr. Hill with the first New Century Writer/Ray Bradbury Short Story Fellowship in 2002.
When not writing books and short stories, Jason is a senior correspondent at the Shore Publishing Community Newspapers, Inc. and a feature writer at Shore Publishing’s upscale élan magazine.
Jason lives in his boyhood home in Guilford, Connecticut.
