Charlene Keeler
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Charlene Joan Keeler, née Jaworski (born August 6, 1969) is an American essayist, critic and novelist living in Orange County, California. She is a monthly columnist for Mad as Hell Club Online, TRex, and has been published in several scholarly and literary periodicals including Glimmer Train, Scope, Salon, The New Yorker, Muse, Butterfinger Paradox, FilmReview, Poetry and Lyric Hounds.
[edit] Background
Born to Polish immigrants, Keeler grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the youngest of five siblings. She spent her last two high school years in Southern New Jersey and moved to California at the age of 21.
Accepted to Princeton as an English major after high school, Keeler refused the invitation and worked in Atlantic City in the Sands Hotel and Casino for several years. Later on, she briefly attended Rutgers University as a pre-med student. She received a BA in English and Psychology with a minor in philosophy from California State University, Fullerton in 1999, and a Master's degree in English with an emphasis in Twentieth Century Literature and Film from the same institution in 2002.[citation needed], Keeler's fiction focuses mainly on relationships, what she calls "absolute connections and disconnections", as well as love, alienation, death, and suicide. Elements of Buddhism and it's dichotomous relationship to existentialism and nihilism are also notable.[citation needed]
She has been teaching writing classes at California State University, Fullerton since 2002 and at the University of California, Irvine since 2003.
In June 2007, Keeler was invited to write a play by Ambulatory Genius Productions. "Razor Blades," a three-act play about the life of struggling jazz musician which she completed under a deadline of two weeks, was performed at an undisclosed location near Griffith Park in Los Angeles for invited donators to the arts. The play received a positive reception, and Keeler was the first recipient of AGP's "Genius of the Year" award.
Keeler also won the best poet's award for 2007 from the Neglected Scholar Foundation for her poem entitled "Anyone But My Boyfriend," which was described as "a masturbational autobiography in experimental poetic form."
She is currently completing two novels and has completed a screenplay scheduled to begin filming in June 2008.
[edit] Published Work
"April Showers." Butterfinger Paradox. Vol 9, March 2006
"Ashes, Ashes." Poetry. http://www.poetry.com
"Eichmann in All of Us: Thoughtlessness and the Banality of Evil in Sophie’s Choice." In Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness Vol. 1 No. 3 | 105, 2003. http://www.wickedness.net
8 Mile Review. In Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. Institute of Film and TV Studies, Nottingham, UK. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/filmreview.php?issue=feb2004&id=631§ion=film_rev
"Last Days Review." Critical Film Review. http://www.critical-film.com/reviews
"Caught in the Middle" Monthly Column. Mad as Hell Club. http://www.madashellclub.net
[edit] Personal life
According to a blog she wrote and later deleted (http://www.myspace.com/ckeeler), and confirmed by her first essay on Mad as Hell Club Online, Keeler's first love committed suicide in 1992 on Christmas Eve.
In 2000, she married Scott Lorn Keeler, former bass player of The Have Nots and a descendant of Ruby Keeler, the legendary jazz performer. She petitioned for divorce in 2007, claiming irreconcilable differences.
