L. Shapley Bassen

Image courtesy of Mike Stanko www.StankoArt.com

My grandmother was a telegrapher on Wall Street a century ago. She taught me to read when I was four, and I remember her tapping out messages in Morse Code on the wooden arm of a chair. The busy intersection of cyberspace & spacetime keeps me alert. I try to build a bit of C.P. Snow’s bridge between the ‘two cultures’ of art/science. I see the world bifocally through science & art.

A native New Yorker, L. Shapley Bassen is grateful to be living in Roger Williams’s Rhode Island. “Portrait of a Giant Squid” was the First Place winner in the 2015 Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest.

“What Can the Matter Be?” was the title/featured story in the special KRO Poetics of Science issue, www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2016-fall/selections/l-shapley-bassen-342846/.

For six years [until cessation of publication], a fiction editor for www. prickof thespindle.com, since 2019 at www.craftliterary.com; indie-published author of 2014 novel Summer of the Long Knives (Typhoon Media), story collection Lives of Crime & Other Stories (Texture Press), 2017 publication of Showfolk & Stories (Inkception Books).

Finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award, a 1st reader for Electric Literature, won the 2009 APP Drama Prize and a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship, and a poetry/fiction reviewer for The Rumpus, among others.

2019, 1^st poetry collection, What Suits a Nudist?

• www.claresongbirdspub.com/featured-authors/l-shapley-bassen/

And a Beatles-inspired story Yesterday, November ’13:

• Yesterday

Sample book reviews:

• The Dead Man’s Back Arches (Marvin Bell Vertigo book review, 8/19/11)
• More Horses Than We Need (Tess Gallagher Midnight Lantern book review, 8/5/11)

First published by Samuel French, Inc., The Month Before the Moon is the serious comedy of the 25th reunion in 1994 of four Vassar women who graduated in the class of ’69 before co-education, the June just before the 1st lunar landing:

• The Month Before the Moon

And a small poem sampling:

• Mnemonic 
• Return to Standard Time 
• Dark Flock 

Remember the black walnut tree
in November, only three shabby ornaments left hanging out her bare sleeves.
She’s going green now.