Mark Millien Email & Phone Number

I didn't know it until I went to take my required eye exam to secure my driver's license permit when I was 15, but my sight was less than perfect. I aced my practical driving exam and the written tests but when it came time to decrypt random letters from the haze beneath the scope, I couldn't do it. I'd been reading by night light since I was a child, devouring stories and accumulating a wealth of vicarious adventures to call my own, and the tax for these riches was, apparently, acute myopia. However, my return on investment was a lifelong devotion to sequencing words to ignite the imagination.I studied at the feet of masters, whose artistic works could be found in comic book stores, the cramped temples of my youth. Every Tuesday I would make another faithful pilgrimage to 9th St and 7th Avenue poring over the pristine newly arrived graphic novels and serialized heroic chronicles. Brimming with my own ideas, I scribbled on every college-ruled line and doodled in every margin until I had shelves of my narratives etched into paper.By the time I attended Morehouse College, I was conversant in the scaffolding that underpins good storytelling but needed the tools I learned there to furnish the space with evocative imagery, memorable details, and the feng shui of fluid prose. I have been professionally telling stories ever since. My podcast, COVID39, has received recognition for its writing and originality. I have been a featured panelist for the Writers Guild of America and a film screener for the Austin Film Festival. In 2021 two of my articles ranked third and fourth in views among all of CBR's television features and one of them ranked tenth in features covering film. My work has been acknowledged by the creators I have analyzed as both critical and laudable, and readers have expressed an appreciation for my stylistic thoroughness.I remain eager for new chapters to explore and stories to tell. In some way we are all changed by the stories that hold meaning for us, the ones that take hold of our emotions or alter our perspectives, granting new valuable insight. My first pair of glasses, I remember being able to see each leaf on a tree and it took my breath away. The world resolved into a vivid masterpiece of minutiae, separated from the indistinct smears that composed my reality. Good stories can serve as the same type of lens, shifting focus and bringing clarity to something familiar or a telescopic vantage of things previously unseen. I continue to work to bring that same type of vision to everything thing I do.

• 

  Morehouse College

  Theater, English, Psychology