Background
Debra Di Blasi was born on May 27, 1957 in Kirksville, Missouri, United States. She is the daughter of Donald Eugene, a cattle rancher and crop farmer, and Donna (Aby) Marlene Pickens, a registered nurse.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811213323/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(Stylistically innovative fiction that tests the borders o...)
Stylistically innovative fiction that tests the borders of gender and class issues, skirting the edge of post-modern erotica. Stylistically innovative fiction that tests the borders of gender and class issues, skirting the edge of post-modern erotica.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1566890837/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fe...)
These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact. The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight, Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to creat a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. "Hyperfictions" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts? This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human—and awake—in the post-millenium. These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact. The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight, Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to creat a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. "Hyperfictions" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts? This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human—and awake—in the post-millenium.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573661368/?tag=2022091-20
2007
("What the Body Requires is to the mind what chocolate is ...)
"What the Body Requires is to the mind what chocolate is to the tongue — rich and decadent." —Carolyn Szczepanski, The Pitch "Some moments involve hi stakes situations and a bit of mystery, though I’d never call What the Body Requires a genre novel. This book is highly sexual, but never cliched. Di Blasi just kills it." —The Next Best Book Blog "Highly ambitious and of the deepest seriousness... with an evocative prose and an exotic, vividly imagined landscape. The consistency with which the writing invests everyday actions and objects with an almost erotic fervor is truly extraordinary." –R.M. Berry, author of Leonardo's Horse, Dictionary of Modern Anguish, and Frank DESCRIPTION: Madeline Rivera goes to Europe to kill her husband, a musician, but falls in love with his doppleganger, an Italian policeman. Structured as a symphony, What the Body Requires explores a woman’s sexuality and passion for art as she slides into the madness of revenge. Structured around an elaborate symphony, What the Body Requires is ripe with music references, musicians and the intentionally overt drama of opera.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0982077513/?tag=2022091-20
2009
("Paul’s prose is skillful, almost ornate, and obsessed wi...)
"Paul’s prose is skillful, almost ornate, and obsessed with the truth of the modern experience of religion. A Song of Ilan is a remarkable exploration of issues and experiences that are often discounted or outright ignored in American writing today." — The Public "A philosophic meditation on the interplay between religion, violence, and personal faith, A Song of Ilan is about what it means to live in a world after 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as seen through its protagonist, Ilan's, desire for God. Through Ilan we see how a direct relationship with God (or the hope for God), divorced from the structure of religious institutions, might take the form of romantic love, and in that relationship's crisis, take on the perils, obsessions, and violence of that love. A Song of Ilan is necessary reading, especially against the backdrop of recent conflict in Gaza, for anyone who wishes to understand the personal, spiritual, and political impact of religious terrorism, and of the violence that seeks to suppress it." —Mark Levine, New York City Council Member and Chair of the City Council Jewish Caucus "Jacob Paul's A Song of Ilan is tour de force of structural experiment that leaves not a thread untied and moves from beginning to end with a mesmerizing if not horrifying fatality. Ilan, once an Israeli soldier, shot a suicide bomber to death in a cafe; ten years later, alcoholic, spiritually paralyzed, he turns himself into a suicide bomber, haunting the New York subway system with explosives under his coat, the only truth he knows, the only way to God. A spectacular book, beautiful in its rhymes, daunting in its ethical interrogation." —Douglas Glover, author of Elle and Savage Love "A Song of Ilan is a dizzying, rhapsodic, and thrilling book that challenges readers to think about how we live, love, and die. A breathless read that plunges us into a brilliant and tortured mind, A Song of Ilan will haunt your days and nights, your kitchen, your bedroom, as well as and your commute, making you wonder who your neighbor, your colleague, your lover really is. Equally elegant and compelling as Paul plumbs rock climbing and scripture, terror and survival, A Song of Ilan strives heroically toward, in Donald Barthelme’s words, 'the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.'" —Matthew Batt, author of Sugarhouse
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2015
("If you want something different, that might provoke some...)
"If you want something different, that might provoke some thinking, this is well worth a go. Go on - expand your mind....." —Tim Gray, Goodreads Horror meets the American Dream in this politically timely, scathing, take-no-prisoners novel about Hollywood, suburban sprawl, racism, gun culture, automobile fetishism, love & hate, and what just may prove to be the American Nightmare. Award-winning author and screenwriter Debra Di Blasi returns to the scene of society’s crimes with comical, outrageous, angry, and horror-filled excoriations. Praise for Debra Di Blasi’s Writing New York Times Book Review: "In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies." Publishers Weekly: "Both Di Blasi's style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer." Kansas City Star: "Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1533552746/?tag=2022091-20
2016
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541371704/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Debra Di Blasi was born on May 27, 1957 in Kirksville, Missouri, United States. She is the daughter of Donald Eugene, a cattle rancher and crop farmer, and Donna (Aby) Marlene Pickens, a registered nurse.
Di Blasi attended the University of Missouri from 1975 to 1978 and Kansas City Art Institute, also she studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, receiving Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from it in 1985.
Di Blasi's writing is included in related literary anthologies, and has appeared in such journals as New Letters, The Iowa Review, Chelsea, Boulevard, Notre Dame Review, and many others.
Debra was the art columnist for The Pitch magazine, and taught experimental writing, hyperfiction, mixed media fiction, and other writing courses at Kansas City Art Institute for seven years. She teaches and frequently lectures on 21st Century narrative forms at universities and conferences including &NOW Conference and Associated Writing Programs Conference.
During 3 years from 1986 she held the position of advertising manager in Robert Half of Northern California. In 1989 Di Blasi was an advertising production manager. From 1992 to 1995 she worked as a senior secretary in International Network Design and Engineering Department, Spring Communications. Simultaneously during 1994 year she served as a writing tutor in Kansas City Art Institute. Also, she was a judge in several poetry competitions.
From 2008 to 2015, Debra was the founding publisher of the multimedia company Jaded Ibis Productions, LLC, and managing editor of its book imprint Jaded Ibis Press. In January 2016 she sold the company's assets to newly formed Jaded Ibis Press, LLC.
Di Blasi's stories have been adapted to radio, film, theatre and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad.
Screenwriting credits include The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition, and Drought, for which she won the Cinovation Screenwriting Award.
Drought was directed by Lisa Moncure won a host of national and international awards. It was one of only six U.S. films included in the Universe Elle special section of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
(Stylistically innovative fiction that tests the borders o...)
1999("Paul’s prose is skillful, almost ornate, and obsessed wi...)
2015("If you want something different, that might provoke some...)
2016("What the Body Requires is to the mind what chocolate is ...)
2009(These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fe...)
2007
Quotations:
“Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, in an environment of social cynicism and political skepticism, I began writing with the intent of becoming an investigative reporter in the vein of Woodward and Bernstein. I wanted to rip the smiling mask off the face of the world and reveal what I suspected to be the grotesque truths beneath."
“Truth took on a larger meaning, and language became something much more significant than merely a means to an end. It was a means to a means. I fell in love with the writing process and thus became a literary bigamist: married to both language and truth. Of course, art and truth should never be separated. I have learned this through poetry, through fiction, through painting, through living."
“Although journalism no longer beckons me, I am still interested in masquerades—the lies we tell ourselves and each other—and the dark, sometimes terrifying shape at our core: raw, ignoble, violent emotions safely tethered—or not. It is really the ‘not’ to which I am most intimately drawn at this point in my career. I am drawn to folks of a desperate nature, who wrestle with and, for whatever reasons, surrender to their darker passions. It is their hearts I wish to expose, slice open, anatomize, report."
“It takes a great deal of empathy to enter into the mind of a society snob, a child abuser, a racist, a suicide, a killer—anyone whose core appears weak or flawed. My protagonists often bear the markings of antagonists, yet they are us: the writer and reader. Perfection and righteousness do not interest me, for they too are lies or, at best, incomplete truths. This society does not teach us compassion. Rather it teaches us (masqueraders, all) to judge, loathe, condemn—to weigh the dark against the light and ignore the many shades of gray in between. Tragedy, as well as triumph, occurs in the gray. In the gray squats the honesty of fiction."
“Likewise, I am drawn to fiction writers whose literary investigations appear similar to mine and whose use of language is, if not innovative, then aurally exciting. Oddly, works in translation appeal to me the most. Something happens during the translation—an emotional distancing from the origin, I suppose, that creates a heightened omniscience I find intellectually and aesthetically seductive. To say that such fiction bears the strongest influence on my writing would lack wisdom; I am influenced by everything I read, and I read diversely: from fiction and poetry to science and theology, to military manuals and fashion slicks. All of it finds its way into my subconscious, and my subconscious finds its way into my fiction.”
Debra married Carlos Roberto Di Blasi in 1984 (they divorced in 1989).
