Lest you thought the Summer of Scam would be restricted to stories of New York socialites like Anna Delvey, there’s a new scam story afoot in the literary world. The Los Angeles Times has pieced together the story of Anna March, who at other times went by Delaney Anderson, Nancy Kruse, and Nancy Lott, a woman who posed as a member of the literary scene in various cities across the U.S., proposing and canceling a series of projects, many of which cost the people around her significant amounts of money. Born Nancy Lott, she started a consulting firm under the name Nancy Kruse. The firm hosted a fundraiser for various public radio stations, launching an online auction in 2004, but failed to repay many of the stations. The radio stations sued Kruse and won a judgement of more than $380,000 against her.
As Nancy Lott, she pleaded guilty to a case involving a political campaign in the 1990s in Maryland. Under the name Delaney Anderson, she ran a writing-focused nonprofit in the mid-1990s but then suddenly quit when it ran into dire financial straits under her leadership. She arrived in L.A. in the early 2010s as Anna March and became part of the literary community, wrote for Salon, and at one point asked friends to contribute to a Kickstarter to fund her. Later, she organized a series of writers workshops which she would suddenly cancel, leaving several people on the hook for travel expenses, and started an online magazine named Roar, where she paid writers a “$25 symbolic honorarium,” though the Times said she has been slow to do so. In response to the Times’ questions, “March” posted a long response on Roar, and has deleted her social-media accounts. The scam, it seems, has come to an end.
