I read early and often, even as a toddler. Now they call it hyperlexia, but back then I was just that baby who read the Cheerio box in her high chair. I wrote for fun, even as a child. As an undiagnosed autistic, early activities included reading the same book over and over again, executing multiple attempts at getting published in Readers Digest's "Life in These United States," writing comedy radio show scripts which I obsessively produced on a cassette player in my bedroom, and writing school papers in the style of writers I liked, to see if teachers would catch on.

I may or may not have turned in assignments written in the styles of Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, James Herriot, John Irving and Douglas Adams. Note: I know they are all dudes. It was a phase. I also spent hours memorizing comic record albums by Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Richard Prior, Lily Tomlin, The Smothers Brothers, Monty Python, Woody Allen, and Eddie Murphy.

​I spent childhood summers propped up on a bar stool at the Ukavets Club in Scranton, Pennsylvania, watching my grandparents enjoy nickel glasses of beer, smoking two packs a day via second-hand smoke, and listening to old men not talk about the war. I loved every minute of it. Later, after we got home, I would raid my grandmother's closet book shelf and read books was too young to understand: Mrs. Mike, Forever Amber, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

​In eleventh grade I briefly joined my high school creative writing club, but was asked to leave after writing a horror poem in the style of Poe's "The Raven." What can I say? I had been reading Stephen King, had recently seen Psycho, and was working out my newfound fear of being stabbed to death while in the shower. I meant nothing by it.

After I dropped out of college at 19, I waited tables and wrote for fun. I also painted and drew pictures which I sold. Then I got married, had children, replaced writing for fun with sleeping for survival, got divorced and went back to college and earned my BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Some years later, after I remarried, I began writing for work (web content, online high school and college course content, scientific textbook ad copy, and editing for others' writing projects). I found I liked nitpicking words to death.

​Then I earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. While there, I won the FIU Provost's Award for Best Creative Project, the FIU Creative Writing Award in Nonfiction, the Kentucky Women Writers' Betty Gabehart Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

​I was also the fiction editor of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and the graduate coordinator for the FIU Writers on the Bay Reading Series. My memoir, Mothers of Sparta, won both the Florida Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.

Somewhere along the way, far into adulthood, I was diagnosed with autism and my life suddenly made sense, but that's a story for another time.

​I have garnered close to fifty publications in national literary journals, including McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Narrative, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, Arts & Letters, as well as other journals and anthologies. Sometimes I help other writers reach their publication goals.

Current special interests include medical narrative, unreliable narrator, function of the implied narrator in fiction, writing about music, point of view, developing persona in creative nonfiction, satire, parody, humor writing, the development of the essay from mid-twentieth century to present.

For health and relaxation, I like music, functional fitness, and regenerative agriculture. My favorite hobbies are people watching, listening to analog music, and poodles. I dream of one day owning an empire of laundromats.

-- Dawn

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

-- Marcus Aurelias