Simone Felice on StageOne

Simone Felice is a celebrated songwriter, author, and poet. He was born on 4 October 1976 in Palenville, New York, a tiny working-class hamlet in the Catskill Mountains. At the age of 12 the young Simone suffered a brain aneurysm and was pronounced clinically dead for seven minutes following emergency brain surgery in a local hospital. Upon recovering he spent several months in intensive care, relearning basic motor skills, including reading and writing. When he was 15 he started a punk band with friends, making weird noise-rock in his grandpa’s barn. Their emphasis was on head-banging and freaky storytelling. By 18, he had quit school and was fronting the band (by this time calling themselves Eight Body Trunk, in homage to the 1950’s Lincoln Continental an aging mafioso drove up and down the streets of their shabby town) as they played barns, bars, and low down clubs, including New York City’s fabled CBGB’s. Eventually the young rockers went their separate ways and Felice began writing poetry and vignettes, leading to the publication of his first collection, The Picture Show, when he was 22 years old. He began performing these bizarre monologues regularly at the historic Nuyorican Poets Café in New York’s lower east side, garnering the young poet invitations to read in London, Los Angeles, Harvard University, San Francisco and Berlin. In 2004 and then 2005, Simone published his first short works of fiction, Goodbye Amelia, a coming of age story about a small-town girl with secrets to keep and a hunger to see the world, and Hail Mary Full of Holes, a fable noir about a prostitute struggling to survive at the dawn of the Reagan era. Felice’s first novel, Black Jesus, the story of a young American Marine shipped home to his nowhere town after being blinded in action by a homemade bomb, and the unexpected love he finds with a mysterious dancer who arrives there fleeing darkness and violence of a different kind, is due out in April 2011. Simone lives less than a mile from the creek-house he was born in, and travels his own country and abroad sharing his stories and singing his songs.