DAWNDAVIES 

 I wrote for fun, even as a child.  Early activities included multiple attempts at getting published in Readers Digest's "Life in These United States,"  writing comedy radio show scripts which I 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. Please know that I love women writers but it's hard to write a 1500-word term paper in the style of Louisa May Alcott, I hadn't yet heard of Murial Spark, and well...no one can write like Toni Morrison. 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. 

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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.

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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).

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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. 

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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.

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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.

         

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

 

For health and relaxation, I like music, functional fitness, and growing plants. My favorite hobbies are people watching, swinging my steel mace, listening to analog music, and poodles. I dream of one day owning an empire of laundromats.