Stephen T. Vessels is a Thriller Award nominated author of SF, dark fantasy and cross-genre fiction. He was born in South Texas, grew up in Colorado and resides now in southern California. He is a lifelong lover of books, art and music, all enthusiasms he acquired from his father, who was himself an avid reader, and with whom he and his siblings attended many jazz and classical performances, and visited many museums. His aspirations to write were aroused at the age of seven by the early SF films of directors like Ib Melchior, the horror films of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi, and the writings of Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Charles Dickens, among many others. His stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and collections from Grey Matter Press and ShadowSpinners Press, among others. In 2012 he received a Best Fiction Award from the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. His story collection, The Mountain & The Vortex and Other Tales, was released this year by Muse Harbor Publishing.
His literary interests are broad and non-sectarian. He began writing poetry at age twelve, and has continued to do so on and off ever since. At the University of Colorado, in Boulder, where he lived two doors down the hall from William S. Burroughs, he studied with Gregory Corso and Ed Dorn and was mentored by Allan Dugan. He invented several eccentric poetic forms that employ bar codes, ZipCodes and Area Codes to set syllabic line-lengths and stanza breaks, and a number of others that involve chance procedures. His poems have been published in journals and a chapbook from Slack Buddha Press.
He received a BA in Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he also studied Book Arts with Harry Reese. There he also began to explore his interest in painting, and had several exhibits of his work in the Santa Barbara area. In Santa Barbara he became a regular attendee of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, where he worked with John R. Reed and Monte Schulz, among many others, and joined the community of writers.
He has also studied with Robert Olen Butler, Jane Smiley and Elizabeth Engstrom. He has written twelve novels, five of which he discarded. His most recent, Fall of the Messengers, is an SF mystery thriller.
His interest in producing visual art has persisted as well. Three years ago, living in constricted circumstances where he had no room for a studio, he began making elaborate drawings with the same pen he writes with. Throughout August of this year, his drawings will be on exhibit at the Andre Zarre Gallery in Manhattan Chelsea, New York City.
5 Interesting Facts About Stephen T. Vessels
• His father was a wildcat oilman and Stephen worked in the Colorado oil fields as a roustabout.
• He read all of Shakespeare’s plays when he was fourteen.
• He once sold an invisible Persian rug to Allen Ginsberg, who paid for it with invisible money.
• In a former life he was an underfed Cheshire cat.
• He derives the inspiration for many of his stories from listening to obscure works of classical music and letting his mind wander.
• He writes all of his drafts longhand.
