Jonathan Marcantoni

Jonathan Marcantoni is an American novelist, screenwriter and editor based out of San Antonio, Texas.

He is a co-founder and Managing Editor in Chief of Aignos, an independent, royalty publisher that seeks out experimental and innovative fiction and nonfiction.

Marcantoni has written has published the novels Communion (with Jean Blasiar), and Traveler's Rest.

His work is described as a mix of stream of consciousness, existentialism, surrealism, and ellipsism.

Marcantoni blends film and theatrical techniques with his narratives, making the environmental and intellectual musings of his characters as essential to the story as the action and dialogue.

Marcantoni was born on June 6, 1984, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

He is of Puerto Rican and Corsican descent.

He spent much of his childhood in Puerto Rico.

He was involved in theatre from an early age and acted in community and semi-professional productions.

At age 18, Marcantoni played the character Louis Ironside in a production of Angels in America.

He join Behind the Masque, a street performance group, which ended a year later when the founder and Marcantoni's mentor, Jaime Burcham, died in a drowning accident.

At age 21, Marcantoni he decided to dedicate himself to writing and filmmaking and began studies in script writing at the Art Institute of Atlanta.

While at the institute, he make several short films with high school friend Todd Carnley.

After three months, Marcantoni dropped out to pursue freelance film work in Atlanta.

After failed attempts to publish any of his scripts, Marcantoni decided to return to school at the University of Tampa.

While in school, Marcantoni produced the short film Discover Fresh Breath, a parody of breath mint commercials.

The short story was published in the anthology The Shortcut: 20 Stories to Get You From Here to There in 2006.

He also became a contributor and frequent guest on the local news program The Bleepin Truth, and wrote restaurant reviews for The Tampa Bay Sun.

This film won the TBS Very Funny Award at the Campus Movie Festival in 2007.

Marcantoni also wrote the short story The Revolutionary, later to become a chapter in Traveler's Rest.

In 2009, Marcantoni graduated from the University of Tampa and found work as an editor with Savant Books and Publications, an independent publisher based in Honolulu.

At Savant, Marcantoni became close to author/playwright Jean Blasiar, working as her editor for the Poor Rich series.

Blasiar asked Marcantoni collaborate with her on some television and play projects, leading to the scripts for the shows Mirage and Lily.

In October 2010, Blasiar began work on a WWII family drama.

Jean asked Marcantoni to collaborate on the book, which centered on a little girl who uses her gift for communicating with animals to find her father, who has gone MIA on the battlefields of France.

Marcantoni added a greater magic realist angle to the work, making it less fantastical, and increased the poeticism between the mother and father, making the book more of a love story than it was originally conceived.

During his time at Savant, Marcantoni also became the editor for Zachary Oliver, whose doctoral thesis on multiple intelligence theory was turned into an education memoir entitled Falling but Fulfilled (2010).

The result of their collaboration was Communion (2011).

In the Spring of 2011, Marcantoni created the manuscript Dancing at the Border of the Abyss, which was later published as Traveler's Rest (2012).

Mirage would be optioned by Merrill Entertainment in 2012 and Lily would have a staged reading in Los Angeles in 2013.

In 2012, Marcantoni and Oliver left Savant and created Aignos Publishing.

After negotiations with Savant, Oliver and Marcantoni were allowed to continue the editing and oversee the release of Traveler's Rest, but the book was not a commercial success.

Marcantoni was given permission from Oliver to develop the Aignos Editorial Department along his own lines, and he immediately proceeded to court authors and editors from both North and South America.

He pushed for Aignos to be bilingual and focused on Hispanic works.

He also sought out authors who were aggressively unconventional, playing with genre and style.

In August 2012, Aignos released Paul Guzzo's book The Dark Side of Sunshine.

The book depicted the history of corruption and injustice in Tampa.

Guzzo's work attracted attention from the St. Petersburg Times, the Tampa Tribune, and Newsweek's The Daily Beast.

The book was moderately successful and set the standard in which Aignos uses a combination of social media and personal appearances to promote its books.

In 2013, Marcantoni hired Rebeca Gomez Galindo to take over the Editorial Department.