Crime Fiction Academy

Summer Workshop at CFA

Dear Friends, I will be teaching a 4-day intensive short story crime fiction workshop July 13-16 at the Center For Fiction. My intention is to bring students from story inception all the way to a polished ready-for-submission piece of work. If you know anyone who has a crime story up their sleeve, wants to write it and get it published please send them my way. This is going to fun! Check details below and on the Center For Fiction website. Thanks. Jonathan Summer 2015 at The Crime Fiction Academy For the first time, The Center will offer a four-day summer writing intensive workshop at our Crime Fiction Academy. Join Jonathan Santlofer for this unique opportunity to polish your work for submission, from first draft to finished story. In addition to a daily workshop session, students will attend an evening panel with publishers and editors from prestigious print and online magazines to learn best practices for … Read more

Crime Fiction Academy Kicks-off with Karin Slaughter

Enjoy a glass of wine while you meet & hear Karin Slaughter talking about her craft, her new novel “Unseen” and the things that have made her one of the most successful thriller writers today. CRIME FICTION ACADEMY kicks off with bestselling author KARIN SLAUGHTER on: Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 7:00pm The Center for Fiction 17 East 47th Street 212 755 6710 View Larger Map

Why Crime Fiction Academy Matters

About a year and a half ago Noreen Tomassi, the Director of Manhattan’s Center For Fiction, came to me with the idea of creating a place for crime fiction. A place where unpublished writers could come to finish the crime novel they’d started but stalled, where writers could be taught by really good published authors, could sit around a table with the best crime fiction writers of our time, people like Lee Child and Elmore Leonard and Laura Lippman, to name just a few, and a place to study and learn from classics in the genre. We did it because no program like it existed. There are writing programs everywhere, but not one that concentrates on crime fiction. In fact, few writing programs offer students even one class in crime fiction (and to those students I say, come take your classes at CFA and we’ll find a way to work it out with your school). … Read more

Val McDermid Interviewed by Jonathan Santlofer at the Center for Fiction

The Scottish writer, Val McDermid is a dream interview, fast, funny, and filled with great stories. Frankly, I could listen to her beautiful lilting accent for hours and her advice about writing is just as beautiful. Like all of the terrific writers who come to Crime Fiction Academy this interview was only the 1st half of a great evening. The 2nd half continued upstairs with the CFA students only and was even more inspiring and more personal.

Brooklyn Book Festival – Criminal Intent

Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books and who runs the Brooklyn Book Festival,  asked me to put together a panel of crime fiction writers. I thought this diverse group would be fun and they were: Lawrence Block (multi-award winning writer of “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” just one of his 40 or so great novels), Susan Isaacs (her hilarious 1st novel, “Compromising Positions,” has become a classic), Peter Blauner (author, reporter and often Law & Order contributor) and Persia Walker (“Black Orchid Blues,” one of those crime novels so steeped in time and place –Harlem in the 1920s—one feels as if they have lived there). The combo of Susan, Larry, Persia and Peter was a great mix of super-smart people, light and dark humor and great commentary on crime writing. Have a look and listen.  

Me and Lawrence Block on Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC

Lawrence Block and I were interviewed on the Leonard Lopate show about writing crime fiction. “Jonathan Santlofer, Director at the Crime Fiction Academy, and Lawrence Block, author and Crime Fiction Academy Master Class Instructor, talk about the academy, a program at the Center for Fiction that’s dedicated to crime writing in all its forms. Jonathan Santlofer is the author of five bestselling novels, including Anatomy of Fear and The Killing Art. Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century, and his most recent novel is A Drop of the Hard Stuff.” Listen here: [audio:http://bak.jonathansantlofer.com/wp-content/uploads/lopate082312cpod.mp3]    

Writing at the Dark End – Reading Party Event – The New Yorker

by Macy Halford It was criminal how sexy it was. Writers of different genres intermingling, their poisons of choice (Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir) placid in Dixie cups. Bright lights, marble busts of dead authors, buttercream-yellow walls and crown molding, an overwhelming air of camaraderie. This was the scene last night at the old Mercantile Library, on East 47th Street, now the Center for Fiction and home (for an hour) to a reading of The End of a Dark Street. The editors of this decidedly transgressive anthology, S. J. Rozan and Jonathan Santlofer, stood and explained their reasoning: by bringing literary heavyweights (among them Madison Smartt Bell, Francine Prose, Amy Hempel, Edmund White) together with crime-fiction heavyweights (among them Lee Child, Laura Lippman, James Grady, Lawrence Block, Val McDermid), the literary legitimacy of crime fiction might be demonstrated: all the stories were so good, Rozan said, that one could not tell which were written by the … Read more