David Boles
For more than four decades, David Boles has preserved the truth by writing, directing, designing, broadcasting, streaming, publishing, editing, teaching, acting, and producing moments of knowing. His work spans the live stage, radio, television, the printed page, cinema, education, and the internet.
David has won worldwide awards for his lifelong moral duty to the examined life. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and maintains memberships in the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. His commitment to authorship means full responsibility: writing, directing, and producing rather than fragmenting creative control.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Boles began as a child actor, winning awards for singing, acting, and dancing. During his teen years, he hosted the Unique Youth radio show on KFOR-AM 1240 and KFRX-FM X103, and served as the weekly Teenaged Movie Critic for KOLN/KGIN-TV's Kidding Around program.
During his award-winning college career, David shifted into behind-the-scenes work in television, film, and live stage as writer, director, and producer. Original productions include The Westborough Crusaders television series for Cablevision, The Weeping Water Cafe (first produced on stage, then adapted for KPTM-TV), A Stone's Throw produced by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Theatre Arts & Dance, and the award-winning art house film Watershed.
He was the youngest undergraduate associate editor for the Prairie Schooner literary quarterly published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and his short story McDugan's Barn won the Mari Sandoz Prairie Schooner Award for Fiction in 1984.
David has consulted for Google, New York University, CBS Television, American Express, the City University of New York, Microsoft, Netscape, New Riders, ABC Pictures, the Nebraska ETV Network, Gillette Communications, and numerous other organizations. Working as a Script Doctor, his clients have said, "David Boles is Abe Burrows without the Pulitzers!"
For the complete multimedia biography including video works, podcast archive, and the Boles Constellation, visit the full biography →
Education & Credentials
Master of Fine Arts
Columbia University, 1991. Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies. Emphasis on Playwriting with Dr. Howard Stein. Consecutive Shubert Organization Presidential Scholarships. BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. High Honors MFA Thesis.
Bachelor of Arts
University of Nebraska, 1987. English major, Theatre minor. Vreeland Scholar. Mari Sandoz Prairie Schooner Award for Fiction. American College Theatre Festival Playwright. Cable ACE Award. Daily Nebraskan Columnist.
Member: Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, PEN America
New Releases
Ideas & Inquiry
RelationShaping
The Claimed Body
The Human Universal Beautiful
The Broadway Machine
From Genius to Joke
Go to Every Funeral
Abandoned in Place
Miscast
The Dark Matter People
Beautiful Numbness
The Last Living American White Male
Passage Land
Technology
The Scientific Aesthetic
UNDERWRITTEN
Carceral Nation
Selling Saturday Morning
The Counterfeit Bargain
The Failed City
The God in the Wire
What the Light Carries
Fiction & Drama
Fractional Fiction
Fractional Fiction is a literary production methodology that transforms public domain works through systematic synthesis with contemporary scientific research. Each novel begins with a classic source text, integrates current research from peer-reviewed domains, and follows established dramatic frameworks to create original narratives that carry the weight of literary tradition while speaking to present concerns.
The series currently includes nine novels, from The Dying Grove (mycorrhizal networks and forest consciousness) and The Held Land (Black land dispossession and inherited memory) through The Likeness (voice cloning and the machinery of fabrication) and Standard Deviation (algorithmic governance and the Panopticon). Explore the series →
The Likeness
Standard Deviation
The Corollary
Civility Certified
The Somnambulist's Prophecy
The Held Land
The Kinship of Strangers
The Inheritance
The Dying Grove
The Westborough Crusaders
In 1982, a sixteen-year-old wrote eight episodes of a dramatic television series about a high school newspaper, a dying boy, a bully, and the adults who failed all of them. Two episodes were produced for Cablevision, won a Cable ACE Award, and aired across the Omaha metropolitan area. The remaining six were never filmed. The scripts survived. Forty-four years later, the series becomes three novels: the year before the cameras arrive, the year they record, and the year after they leave.
Eight scripts. Two episodes. One trilogy. The characters are fictional. The feelings are not. Explore the trilogy →
The EleMenTs Series
Four disabled teenage girls discover elemental powers that defy explanation. Elle is Deaf and commands wind. Meen is blind and controls fire. Teena has cerebral palsy and moves earth. Tal has autism and feels water. Their names encode their identity: take the right letters from Eleanor, Mingzhu, Christina Sarah, and Talia, and you spell EleMenTs.
Hunted by Prometheus Applied Sciences, they must choose between hiding and fighting for a world that has always underestimated them. The trilogy follows their arc from discovery in the tunnels beneath New York City to a Senate hearing in Washington where visibility becomes either liberation or the final vulnerability. Explore the trilogy →