Footprints
Charles
Degelman
Charles Degelman has performed as musician and actor and written and edited narrative and dramatic fiction, non-fiction, film stories, commentary, and educational materials. After graduating from Harvard College, Degelman migrated to San Francisco where he wrote, produced, and performed with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Pickle Family Circus, the Red Balloon Theater Company and other ensembles in the rich Bay Area theater scene of the late 1960s and ‘70s.
In 1983 Degelman moved to Los Angeles, where he established a beachhead as a musician and began writing both words and music for documentary and educational media. In 1988, he co-founded the Indecent Exposure Theater Company. Indecent Exposure (IndEx), is a Los Angeles-based theater company dedicated to creating original, high-quality, socially relevant work for the stage.
For over a decade, Degelman served as writer and editor of social-studies and civic-education curricula, textbooks, periodicals, and Internet resources for Constitutional Rights Foundation (CRF), a Los Angeles-based, non-profit, non-partisan educational organization. Published titles include books on U.S. and world history and government; civic education; media literacy, diversity, violence, and school and community activism; monographs on contemporary issues (free speech, gun control, multiculturalism, bilingual education, terrorism, immigration), and more.
Degelman has also written and produced documentary and educational films for TNT, Churchill Films, Pyramid Films, Philips Interactive Media, and others. Titles include a feature-length biography of filmmaker John Huston for TNT and an award-winning biography of Mozart for Philips Interactive.
His first screenplay, FIFTY-SECOND STREET, garnered an award from the Diane Thomas Competition, opened many agency doors and inspired a drawer full of ambitious screenplays.
His first novel, A Bowl Full of Nails, was a finalist in the Bellwether Competition, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver. Impressions of two trips to Cuba have been published in Cuba by Travelers Tales. Excerpts from American Postcards, narrative snapshots of growing up absurd in the 1950s appear in Above Ground.
Degelman recently completed Gates of Eden, a novel set during the anti-war movement of the 1960s and is currently enrolled as an MFA candidate in Communications Studies at California State University at Los Angeles.
He also serves as Editorial Director for Harvard Square Editions, a new, independent publishing house dedicated to carrying a living, contemporary fiction across national and cultural borders.
Member, PEN USA
Member, National Writers Union (NWU), Los Angeles Chapter
Member, National Council on the Social Studies
Member, California Council on the Social Studies
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