Marcelle Clements was born in Paris, France, came to New York in 1958, and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in NYC and Bard College. She began her career as a journalist in the mid-seventies in France, writing about both French culture and the American expatriate sub-culture, the arts, and politics for The Paris Metro, an English language bi-weekly. Since then she has written extensively on a wide variety of subjects - from the arts to interactive technology - for newspapers such as The New York Times, Newsday, The Washington Post, and The Village Voice, and for magazines such as Esquire, Elle, Premiere, Mademoiselle, Ms., Rolling Stone, Mirabella, and Harper's Bazaar.
She has published a collection of essays, The Dog Is Us (1985); a novel, Rock Me (1989); and The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing Single Life (1998), which Maggie Scarf called "an eye-opening, wonderfully written, wonderfully illuminating book." She is presently completing a second novel.
She is a trustee of Bard College, a Member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities of New York University.
Whether you have read one of his comic novels or not, you have probably encountered Mark O'Donnell's work. You may have enjoyed his writing on Saturday Night Live or The Comedy Zone in the early '80s or caught one of his bit parts on Late Night with David Letterman; heard him doing improv on WNYC's "The Next Big Thing"; seen his short stories or cartoons in The New Yorker, Spy, the National Lampoon, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine or elsewhere; read one of his poems in Ploughshares or The New Republic; seen one of his Off-Broadway plays; or picked up one of his story collections, Elementary Education and Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales.
His novels Getting Over Homer (1996) and Let Nothing You Dismay (1998) have touched and delighted readers and won critical acclaim. Dan Cryer of Newsday describes his second novel: "A delight...Academic pretense, bohemian fakery...sibling rivalry, the search for love and the comforts of friendship. Let Nothing You Dismay ties them all together in a well-told story...By turns zany and meditative, satirical and mellow."
Mark also proudly claims "five lovely sisters and four stalwart brothers" who have made him an uncle over forty times!
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This series made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.