Porter Ander­son (@Porter_Anderson) is a 32-year career jour­nal­ist whose venues have included three of Time Warner’s CNN net­works, the Vil­lage Voice, the Dal­las Times Her­ald, Dal­las Observer, D Mag­a­zine, the Tampa Tri­bune, the Sara­sota Herald-Tribune, and other media. Anderson’s roles in news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, net­work tele­vi­sion, and online net­work news have included critic, reporter, edi­tor, man­ag­ing edi­tor, news anchor, con­tent coor­di­na­tor and senior producer.

Ander­son writes the weekly Thurs­day col­umn Writ­ing on the Ether for Vir­ginia Quar­terly Review dig­i­tal edi­tor and national pub­lish­ing ana­lyst Jane Fried­man.

His new inter­na­tion­al­ist edi­tion of the col­umn, specif­i­cally for writ­ers, is Ether for Authors, read weekly on Tues­days at Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives.

A third Ether fran­chise has opened, Lon­don on the Ether, pre­miered dur­ing the Lon­don Book Fair by The Book­seller in both its print “show daily” edi­tions on the floor at Earls Court and also online at its site, TheBookseller.com. You can see the most exten­sive pro­duc­tion on this col­umn in its Yudu ren­di­tion of the show dailies:

• 16 April edi­tion Lon­don on the Ether (see page 19)
• 17 April edi­tion Lon­don on the Ether (see page 11)

Ander­son is also a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to Writer Unboxed, and  to Dig­i­tal Book World’s Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He is a reg­u­lar con­fer­ence speaker and panel mod­er­a­tor and a live webi­nar instruc­tor with Writer’s Digest Uni­ver­sity.

As a speaker, he has appeared with The Future­Book Con­fer­ence in Lon­don, Writer’s Digest Con­fer­ence West in Los Ange­les, Writer’s Digest Con­fer­ence East in New York, Dig­i­tal Book World in New York, and O’Reilly Media Tools of Change’s spe­cially pre­pared Author ®evo­lu­tion Day in New York.

His Pub­lic Pre­sen­ta­tion for Authors boot camp was debuted in April 2013 at Writer’s Digest Con­fer­ence East. The event, run­ning three hours, brought par­tic­i­pants up to the micro­phone with their own text to read and gain imme­di­ate feed­back and coach­ing. Cov­er­ing not only live-event pre­sen­ta­tion (read­ings) but also tele­vi­sion, radio, and online pres­ence, the course offers pro­fes­sional train­ing to new­com­ers to the lit­er­ary field whose expe­ri­ence of pub­lic appear­ance and per­for­mance may be limited.

Ander­son is reg­u­larly flown to pub­lish­ing con­fer­ences and trade shows by orga­niz­ers who hire him to “live-tweet” ses­sions of their events in a for­mat he devel­oped at CNN, tak­ing each ses­sion from its begin­ning to end with fully expli­cated quotes from pan­elists and a com­pre­hen­sive deliv­ery of the discussion’s arc. This pro­vides a chance for pub­lic engage­ment — both by event atten­dees and by oth­ers around the world — in a real-time for­mat of cogent inter­ac­tion and global vis­i­bil­ity for the event.

A Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute, Ander­son has pro­fes­sion­ally reviewed books, the­ater, dance, music, and visual arts for sev­eral main­stream media for three decades. Most recently his reviews of lit­er­ary fic­tion were read at the unfor­tu­nately short-lived Reader Unboxed site.

Ander­son accepted a United Nations P5 diplo­matic post­ing (with laissez-passer) to Rome as Cre­ative Advi­sor and Multi-Media Man­ager to the UN’s World Food Pro­gramme. And he was Cre­ative Con­sul­tant and Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life, the Dan­ish government’s awards pro­gram for inter­na­tional human­i­tar­ian design in Copen­hagen under the royal patron­age of HRH Fred­erik, Prince of Denmark.

Prior to becom­ing a jour­nal­ist, Ander­son worked as an Equity actor and as an account exec­u­tive with Siegerman Asso­ciates, Inc., in pub­lic rela­tions and adver­tis­ing. His play script, Bernard Shaw: Weed­ing the Gar­den, was based on the reli­gious writ­ings of George Bernard Shaw. It was entered into the per­ma­nent Shaw Archives by Dan Lau­rence. Ander­son was granted a limited-time per­for­mance license for the piece by the Shaw Estate via the Soci­ety of Authors in London.

Ander­son holds a BA (William and Mary), an MA (Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan), and an MFA (Florida State Uni­ver­sity Asolo Con­ser­va­tory). He has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, England.

In his 2011 Atlantic Cen­ter for the Arts (ACA) res­i­dency, Ander­son worked with Mas­ter Artist and nov­el­ist Vic­to­ria Redel of Sarah Lawrence College.

He is a mem­ber of Dig­i­tal Book World, the Amer­i­can Men’s Stud­ies Asso­ci­a­tion, the Asso­ci­a­tion of Writ­ers & Writ­ing Pro­grams, the Amer­i­can The­atre Crit­ics Asso­ci­a­tion (for­mer exec­u­tive com­mit­tee mem­ber) and the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of The­atre Crit­ics (for­mer vice president).

Ander­son is a native of Charleston, South Car­olina, and now is based in Tampa, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He is a long­time sup­porter of the Museum of Mod­ern Art (MoMA). As part of his inter­est in the poten­tial impact of seri­ous music and writ­ing on each other, he has made the first chal­lenge grant to lis­ten­ers of Q2 Music, the 24/7 live-streaming con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal Inter­net ser­vice of NPR flag­ship WNYC/WQXR in New York.

Photo made in Copen­hagen, offices of INDEX: Design to Improve Life by Mik­los Szabo

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com and (Mon­days) ETHER FOR AUTHORS col­umn at PublishingPerspectives.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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