identity theory | featured author

Felicia C. Sullivan

Felicia Sullivan is a girl that likes pancakes and her meat well done. She’ll wait all year for the two weeks that lilacs are in full bloom to decorate her coatroom-sized apartment, and she’ll buy three boxes of cereal because, well, one can never have enough cereal. She likes to blast Led Zeppelin with all the windows in her house raised high. Felicia is a yoga junkie and a culinary goddess. Fish and those in the fish family give her vertigo, and pop music tends to confuse her. Felicia’s most favorite and hated word is home.

Born in Brooklyn, Felicia was a latch-key city kid, omnipotent and proud in her Converse All-Starz. Her first attempts at writing were two haikus at age 5 – one about lightening and the other, her mother. For years, she would pen poems on scraps, type them on a Commodore 64, a toaster-shaped Apple. As a teenager, she lived in Long Island – fodder for her adult fiction. Never quite fitting in (she wasn’t a cheerleader and she had no desire for student council), Felicia took up books – Cheever, Salinger, Faulkner – her triumvirate of great men. In her high school yearbook, everyone wished her well, said things like: Good luck with that writing! and You have one twisted sense of humor!

In college, she majored in finance because she saw Wall Street one too many times and numbers came easy to her. Felicia stood out, excelled. And this seemed all well and good, this smooth trajectory until three years at a major investment bank and those ill-fitted suits and pale hose wore her down. Collecting letters of recommendation that were to be sent to Harvard, Wharton and Stern MBA programs, they instead were shipped to various MFA programs. She’d never shown anyone her work (well unless you count her cat Ziti – Felicia has an obsession with Italian food and thinks this whole non-carb world is nonsense). When Columbia called to congratulate her, the first words out of her mouth were, Okay, who put you up to this?

Sifting through a failed dot-com and a tough first semester at Columbia, she took a break from both to focus on her writing and get her proverbial house in order. After a breakthrough savasana pose in yoga, the idea for Small Spiral Notebook was born. In August 2001, Felicia gathered friends and funds to create a community that would celebrate great writing and art that had been previous ignored by the politics of the publishing world. First-time poets, established writers and all those that simply had affection for literature found a home on this little zine that could.

Fueled by modest publishing success and her return to Columbia, new characters, and a collection of short stories were brewing in 2002. Currently, Felicia is almost finished with a collection of stories loosely titled, The Business of Leaving. In the back of that crowded head (she now co-directs a non-fiction series at KGB BAR in NYC and will soon bring Small Spiral Notebook to print), a novel stirs – characters based in Weimar Austria. An examination of the delineation of the German culture after the Great War and their subsequent acceptance of Nazism. During 2002-2003, Felicia has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has published in numerous on-line and print journals and is in full fundraising mode for a print annual of her literary journal.

An obsessive reader, piles and piles of books cover the floors, shelves and bookcases of her studio apartment. Currently on the agenda: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Aimee Bender’s The Girl in The Flammable Skirt, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, among others. A fan of food, she is currently working on perfecting her apple pie and cranapple crisp.

Her work can also be found in the most recent Post Road magazine.

Her personal website is, appropriately, feliciasullivan.com.