Joseph Ross Angelella
Senior Lecturer, English
1210 Tawes Hall
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Education
B.A., English Literature, Ithaca College
M.F.A., Creative Writing and Literature, Bennington College
Research Expertise
Creative Writing
Film
Genre
Language, Writing and Rhetoric
Media Studies
Playwriting
Speculative Fiction
Visual Storytelling
Joseph Ross Angelella is the author of the irreverent and twisted coming-of-age novel Zombie (Soho Press). His award-winning short fiction has appeared in various journals, including Hunger Mountain, Sou’wester, The Literary Review, Coachella Review, and Southampton Review. In 2012, his short story “Sauce” won the Coachella Review’s short story contest judged by novelist Stephen Graham Jones. His original screenplays have won numerous awards, most recently “Best Comedy Short Script” at the Houston Comedy Film Festival (2020) and “Best Characters in a Screenplay” at the Baltimore Next Media Web Fest (2022). His feature screenplay Goon Squad Motherfuckers! was also a finalist for the “Best Un-Produced Screenplay” in the Houston Horror Film Festival (2022). He received an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Currently, he serves as a fiction editor and writing coach at Angelella Editorial and has been a member of the University Film & Video Association since 2021. He teaches writing in the English department at the University of Maryland College Park where he has been nominated for the Donna B. Hamilton Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in General Education three times (2017, 2018, 2019) and winner of the Professional Track Faculty Teaching Award (2019). He also serves as screenwriting faculty in the Electronic Media & Film department at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore. Visit his website: www.jrangelella.com.
Courses
ARHU275/ENGL275 - Writing to Be Seen: Introduction to Scriptwriting
ENGL272 - Fiction Writing: A Beginning Workshop
ENGL393 - Technical Writing
ENGL394 - Business Writing
ENGL395 - Writing for the Health Professions
ENGL398R - Writing Nonfiction Narratives
Creative
“Light Like Gunshots.”
The cops release me after they review the surveillance footage. I sign a paper that says I was treated with respect and dignity while incarcerated.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaAnnie picks me up from the police station. Jack and Nicole are both asleep in the back seat of the car. Annie turns the key in the engine.
“A Good Hour.”
While later in the day he’ll be let go from his job as a copywriter at an online men’s zine, Ransom spent his lunch break watching the destruction of a church.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaHis wife, Venus, watched too and said many things.
Nemesis
Short Screenplay, Dark Comedy/Drama (10 pages)
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaZombie: A Novel
High school may be hell. But for fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker, hell doesn’t end when the bell rings.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross Angelella"Horse and His Fishermen."
Horse and his fishermen lean arms into the worn wood of the bar, sucking juice from boysenberries.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaHorse and his fishermen sip water and smoke cigarettes, faces salt stained and cracked raw. Their fishy eyes fall on girls.
"Does She."
Is she good?
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaAnd I don’t mean versus bad, but is she better?
"The Hammer and the Flame."
My father complained of having flame-shaped hands.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaHe hated that he didn't have hands like his father, my grandfather, which were, according to my father, hammer hands. But, unfortunately, he, my father, had flame-shaped hands and would often wear gloves to hide them away.
"The Room of Ransom Black."
He stood in his hotel room, counting coins on the dresser next to his typewriter.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaThe sun slept under morning clouds, giving off a bluish light through the dark buildings of the city.
"Wheelwoman."
Molly Blaze left the marriage with the only thing she brought into it—her 1987 Buick Regal Limited T–Type Turbo.
English
Lead: Joseph Ross AngelellaFuneral black. Chrome bumpers and trim. Blood red velour pillow seats and paneling. The first thing she bought herself after college. An investment in her future. And Ritch stole it.
