Mark Axelrod is a Full Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Chapman University, and the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing, and a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award. He has published four novels, a short story collection and three books of criticism.

He is also a practicing screenwriter who has written two film books and over twenty screenplays and teleplays. He has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute.

"Axelrod is an innovative writer, with a postmodern inclination for exotic linguistic labyrinths of the mind into which he loves to encapsulate his own tormented fantasies."

-World Literature Today

"A different voice in North American Writing...a very special, poignant sense of humor."

-Luisa Valenzuela