Jonathan Marcantoni

Jonathan Marcantoni was born on June 6, 1984 in Collegeville, PA. He is of Puerto Rican and Corsican descent and spent much of his childhood in Puerto Rico. He is a novelist, screenwriter and editor based out of San Antonio, Texas. He is a co-founder and Managing Editor in Chief of Aignos, an independent, royalty publisher that seeks out experimental and innovative fiction and nonfiction. He has two novels published, both with Savant Books and Publications, Communion (with Jean Blasiar), and Traveler's Rest. His work is a mix of stream of consciousness, existentialism, surrealism, and ellipsism. He blends film and theatrical techniques with his narratives, making the environmental and intellectual musings of his characters as essential to the story as the action and dialogue.

Marcantoni spent his early life moving up and down the East Coast, primarily in the south. He was involved in theatre from an early age and acted in community and semi-professional productions until the age of 21, when he decided to dedicate himself solely to writing and filmmaking. When he was eighteen, he starred as Louis Ironside in a production of Angels in America, which made him briefly want to be a professional actor. He went on to join Behind the Masque, a street performance group, which ended a year later when the founder and Marcantoni's mentor, Jaime Burcham, died in a drowning accident. Jaime's death made Marcantoni reconsider his creative path and he began to focus on script writing, which led him to attend the Art Institute of Atlanta. He was joined at the school by high school friend Todd Carnley, and together they made several short films. He attended the school for only three months, leaving to pursue freelance work in Atlanta's film community.

After working odd jobs and signing a contract with Fourmis Productions, which would prove fruitless as none of the scripts he wrote were produced, Marcantoni decided to return to school, this time at the University of Tampa. In Tampa, Mr. Marcantoni experienced his first successes as a writer and filmmaker. His short film Discover Fresh Breath, a parody of breathmint commercials, won the TBS Very Funny Award at the Campus Movie Festival in 2007. His short story "The Revolutionary", which would later be used as a chapter in Traveler's Rest, was published in the anthology The Shortcut: 20 Stories to Get You From Here to There in 2006. He also became a contributor and frequent guest on the local news program The Bleepin Truth, and wrote restaurant reviews for The Tampa Bay Sun, a bi-weekly newspaper based out of Largo, Fl. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Tampa and found work as an editor with Savant Books and Publications, an independent publisher based in Hawaii.

At Savant, Marcantoni became close to author/playwright Jean Blasiar, working as her editor for the Poor Rich series. Jean asked Marcantoni collaborate with her on some television and play projects, leading to the scripts for Mirage and Lily. Mirage would be optioned by Merrill Entertainment in 2012 and Lily would have a staged reading in Los Angeles in 2013. In October 2010, Jean would begin work on a WWII family drama. Jean asked Marcantoni to collaborate on the book, which centered on a little girl who uses her gift for communicating with animals to find her father, who has gone MIA on the battlefields of France. Marcantoni added a greater magic realist angle to the work, making it less fantastical, and increased the poeticism between the mother and father, making the book more of a love story than it was originally conceived. The result of their collaboration was Communion (2011).

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