JANNA WONG HEALY
Writer ~ Editor ~ Educator ~ Social Media Manager
I was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. After attending local public schools, I received my Bachelor's degree in English and my Master's degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. Professionally, I have spent my entire life around the written word. I have been a story analyst for film companies and studios, written articles for magazines and publicity materials for organizations, edited book manuscripts for publishers, written materials for DVDs and served as a researcher and editor for studio press kits. I've also been a paid blogger, written about casual gaming for The Clik/Character Arcade, a website
owned by USA Network, about sports for Blogher.com and Boise Sports Network, and about British cinema and television for Anglotopia.net. In addition, I am a professor of Business Communication at USC's Marshall School of Business, teaching a variety of courses in business communication, and I also manage the department's Social Media accounts.
To complement my professional writing experiences, I continue to write creatively. I was accepted into the prestigious David Henry Hwang Writers Workshop of East West Players, where I developed several plays, including a one-act, Couplings, which received a staged reading at the theater; and Sweet and Sour, which was a finalist in the New Playwrights Competition at Theater Mu. I was also accepted into the Playwrights Kitchen Ensemble of the Coronet Theater in West Hollywood. Through this association, I developed a full-length romantic comedy, The Girl and the Goon, which resulted in a successful staged reading. My short story collection, A Life in Yellow-Gold, was performed in the inaugural "Emerging Voices," a program sponsored by The New Short Fiction Series that presents well-written fiction by unpublished authors.
I took those stories and transformed them into a novel published to Amazon Kindle, Mariana Wong's Summer of Love, which was a quarter-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition and also in Screencraft Book Contest. My second novel, Let's Get Lost, is also available on Kindle. A third novel has been completed, entitled The Girl and the Goon.
Recently, short stories have been published by WriteOut Publishing ("Black Tie Blues") and Centum Press ("The Opened Door" in 100 Voices, Volume 2. A short play, "The Hypothesis of Love" was performed by Offending Shadows Theater in North Hollywood. Most recently, a collection of short stories, "Unbreakable China" are now available on Kindle-Vella.
In addition, I am Social Media Manager for actor Matt Barr.
