ABOUT ANTHONY

Anthony R. Cardno was born in Astoria NY, in the shadow of  the Triboro Bridge, and is thus a hereditary Mets fan.  He was  raised in Mahopac, NY, which much to his city-based relatives’  disbelief is not really “upstate New York” as most of the state  reckons it.  He attended Elmira College in western NY, which  was a bit closer to “upstate,” but still not quite there.  After a two  year detour to Roanoke VA, he has spent the past twenty-some-odd years living in Sussex County, NJ, which actually resembles “upstate  New York” most of the time.  (This begs the question: as the  most northern point in the state, why is Sussex County not  called “upstate New Jersey?”) 

Because not living in upstate New  York seems to have become a theme in his life, much of  Anthony’s fiction revolves around the fictional towns of  Baldwin and Kendrick NY and the even more fictional Croton  College.

Anthony’s first published work was a “hero history” of Marvel Comics’ “The Invaders” in the now-defunct Amazing Heroes magazine in the mid-80s.  In 1993, his one-act play “Sneakers in the Sand” was produced by Elmira College.  In the late 90s, Anthony had several articles on adventure camping and keeping “creative trip journals” published in Camping, the official magazine of the American Camping Association, and presented workshops on storytelling and nature writing at several Alliance of New Jersey Environmental Educators (ANJEE) conferences.

Anthony’s favorite punctuation mark is the semi-colon because thanks to cancer surgery in 2005, a semi-colon is all he has left. “After cancer, I became a semi-colon” even made it into abook of Six Word Memoirs.

His short stories include literary fiction, science fiction, super-heroes, fantasy and horror.  November of 2008 saw the publication of his Christmas novella for all ages, “The Firflake – A Christmas Story,” and he writes a new Christmas/Winter poem every year.   In 2012, Anthony joined the staff of LIGHTSPEED magazine as proofreader. He edited and published his first anthology, “The Many Tortures of Anthony Cardno,” in 2014, donating all proceeds to the American Cancer Society. He has also co-written and recorded four songs (one with Barry Mangione of Blue Alien Mystic, two with John Russo of The Wildfires Projekt, and one with Michael Walker of Paradise Fears). All of which goes to prove that you can live most of your life in the same basic geographic region and still have your writing be “all over the map.”