Janet Thielke graduated from Houston, TX’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts theatre department in 2006. Soon after having a play produced there as part of a student festival, she abandoned a burgeoning career as a classically trained actress for the much more financially secure pursuit of creative writing. While at USC, she studied Advanced Fiction with Aimee Bender, Marianne Wiggins, and T.C. Boyle. Other highlights of her college career include serving as research assistant to Bruce Smith during fall 2007 and studying abroad in Norwich, England spring 2008. Her theatre background came in handy in summer 2009 when she was granted an internship with LA Stage Alliance through the LA County Arts Commission. She was later hired as Assistant Editor and staff writer for their online magazine LA Stage (www.lastageblog.com) and has worked for them through her senior year. This past semester, she completed a senior honors critical thesis on Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. For her creative thesis, she began a novel; unfortunately, as is so frequently the case, they were both young, there were irreconcilable difference, etc., and they have temporarily parted ways.
She is so honored to be one of the Jimmy Award recipients – celebrating an amazing individual and writer – and considers it the highest of her writing accolades. Other wins include second place in the USC wonderland award and second place in the Edward W. Moses Undergraduate Creative Writing Competition. She also took first place in the Undergraduate Writing Awards an unprecedented two times for her short stories. Nationally, she has been awarded an NFAA ARTS Merit Award for excerpt from a novel, a Scholastic Art and Writing Silver Award for dramatic script, and another Silver Award for her general writing portfolio. She realizes these awards mean very little without context, but appreciates that their names are long and provide ample padding for her bio. In August 2009, her first professional play was staged by Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre of Houston as part of the Freneticore Fringe festival, where it won audience’s favorite. Her second play for the company premieres May 2010. She has also volunteered to write a play to be performed by troubled youths at the Center for Success and Residential Rehab in Houston summer 2010.
A travel enthusiast, Janet’s life goals center on becoming a vagabond and starving artist. Achievements in this pursuit thus far include train-hopping across Europe; braving the Canadian wilderness at a fly-in fishing cabin sans electricity, running water, and another female for twenty miles; and SCUBA diving the underwater cavern/cenote in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Immediately following graduation, she will return to the UK for an internship with Anthem Press in London and read submissions for the online literary journal Narrative. She plans to continue to work and write fiction and plays in Edinburgh, Scotland in the coming year.
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