Nonfiction
Alethea Kontis

The Pros and Cons of Stage Directions

I started acting on stage at seven. My first role was Marcie in We’re All Stars, Charlie Brown. I don’t remember the audition, but I do remember my mother’s reaction: something along the lines of “What? My child, with her nose permanently stuck in books, whose best friend is a tree, is going to stand up in front of people? AND SING??”

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Novel Excerpt
Alethea Kontis

Haven, Kansas (Novel Excerpt)

The tingling burn spread out from the center of Erin’s chest like slow lightning, so paralytic at first that she worried her body would forget how to breathe. But her body was breathing. Was moving.

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Award Nominees
Alethea Kontis

Blood from Stone

He had no idea that I loved him. He barely acknowledged that I existed, a maid twice over, little more than a shadow in empty hallways. Trapped in unhappy marriage and prisoner in his own castle, he did not conceive that anyone loving him was even possible. The baron was a man of war, not of love.

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Short Fiction
Alethea Kontis

A Poor Man’s Roses

At first, she sang to remember. It was a way to pass the long, dark time, a way to drown out the buzz in her head when the earth shook and the bunker rattled, a way to live outside the bars of her cage, to be a woman who smoked and drank, flirted and pined, flipped her pin curls and married a man for his car.

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