Gina M. Angelone grew up in Philadelphia with her father’s post-war stories about battling in the trenches with his army buddy, Burt Lancaster. Together, Dad and Burt traded artillery for auditions and headed to Hollywood. Talk of show biz and its mythic encounters sparked Gina’s imagination even decades after her father had hung his fedora. Writing, meanwhile, lingered more quietly in the air, like a thought she couldn’t quite shake.
It wasn’t until spending college years in Paris (because of course it was Paris) that things began to rearrange themselves. Studying with Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and her literary hero Milan Kundera, Gina found herself wandering into the overlapping territories of feminist theory, semiotics, and literature. Somewhere in that heady mix, she began to understand that words weren’t just expressive: they were structural, subversive, and alive.
After researching and working across four continents (and picking up as many languages), Gina committed herself to filmmaking. She wrote, directed, and produced award-winning documentaries and television, collecting festival prizes, major grants, and a few EMMYs along the way. Her cinematic sensibility has since become her way of seeing the world.
Her first short story appeared in the Doubleday anthology Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling Women and was featured by the Literary Guild of America. Since then, her stories and micro-fictions have found homes in a range of print and online journals. In 2022, she took second prize in the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction, with publication in Philadelphia Stories. Earlier, she was a semi-finalist for both the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and the Nimrod Literary Awards’ Katherine Anne Porter Prize. She’s also received writing grants from the Speranza Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For Gina, storytelling—whether on screen or on the page—is a way to remain (at least artistically) in the trenches with those who have deeply influenced her perspective.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Gina Angelone’s Portrait of a Stranger in 2028.
