Prose Writers Showcase Featuring David Bushman, Cynthia Stephens, and Mark Marchand

The Hudson Valley Writers Guild will host the Prose Writers Showcase on March 2, 2024 from 1-2:30 pm at the Albany Public Library – Washington Avenue Branch in the Community Room. This event will feature selections from writers David Bushman, Cynthia Stephens, and Mark Marchand, followed by a Q & A from the audience. We anticipate hosting more public readings and inviting local prose writers to participate. Please get in touch with the HVWG to express interest.

David Bushman is the author of five traditionally published nonfiction books, including two true crime stories set in the Capital Region: Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks Thomas + Mercer 2022) and Forget It, Jake, It’s Schenectady: The True Story Behind ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023). He is copresident and cofounder of two indie publishers, Fayetteville Mafia Press and Tucker DS Press, and a member of the board of the Mystery Writers of America’s New York chapter. He previously spent twenty-five years as a TV curator at The Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television and Radio).

Cynthia Stephens is a native New Yorker who lived in each of the New York City’s five boroughs by the age of seventeen. She earned a Ph.D. in Deafness Rehabilitation from New York University and worked in the field of disability for 35 years. Always a theater-lover, Dr. Stephens founded Sacred Ground Productions as a necessary response to stereotypical narratives about Black people purely for the sake of theatrical entertainment.

Dr. Stephens has written two musicals, including Nineteen Secrets (highlighting the personal life of Harriet Tubman), and The Princess and the Golden Yam (a classic fairy tale based in West Africa). She also authored the book for one straight play, Painted Red (chronicling the life of Henrietta Lacks and the cost to her family of her premature death and medical exploitation). Cynthia won the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s Lab Award for Painted Red.

She has also authored and self-published four children’s books, On Days Like These, 133 Daunting Days, and Before Day Clean. During the period of COVID isolation, Dr. Stephens transformed her musical The Princess and the Golden Yam into a storybook, and edited one adult book titled, The Chains That Join (a collection of personal stories, poems, and tributes from people of the African diaspora). In 2021, Cynthia produced and narrated, with the support of a grant from the Steve McKee Foundation, her first documentary film about COVID and the Black community. She is currently working on her second fairy-tale, titled, The Angry Mermaid.

Sources of inspiration for Dr. Stephens are the stories told to her by her Gullah grandmother, who was from the South Carolina Sea Islands, and varied experiences of African American people. She believes that people should author their own stories, tell their own truths, and shine their own lights. For, “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” (African Proverb).

Mark Marchand of Clifton Park is a writer and former adjunct professor in the Journalism Program at the University at Albany (SUNY), teaching courses in news and reporting, crisis communications, and public relations writing from 2008 until 2023. He served as a senior manager in corporate communications and media relations at Verizon for almost 25 years. After Verizon he directed RPI’s News office for three and one-half years.  He started his professional career as a daily newspaper reporter in Springfield, Mass. He flies airplanes as a hobby and often consults on communications and crisis communications, in addition to pursuing his own writing. He has published a number of freelance science and environmental articles recently. In 2018 he published his first book, about his long solo drive down U.S. Route 1 from northern Maine to Key West. He published his second book, a historical fiction novel, in 2021. He’s working on two more. First is a memoir about learning to fly airplanes, and his subsequent adventures in the air. He has just started his fourth book, about driving U.S. Route 20 from Newport, Oregon, to Boston during the summer of 2023.  He’s a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.