Dawn Dorland, a writer currently based in Los Angeles, will be our visiting artist for 6 weeks in September-October 2015.
Dawn was raised in rural Iowa and graduated from Scripps College, Harvard Divinity School, and the MFA program at the University of Maryland, where she received full funding and won a teaching award. Works-in-progress have garnered her fellowships and other support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the Hambidge Center for the Arts and elsewhere. Dawn’s fiction appears in Green Mountains Review online, The Drum Literary Magazine, and is collected in Paragraph; her essays are available on the GrubStreet blog. Based in Los Angeles, Dawn teaches for Writing Workshops LA and the Downtown Women’s Center, serving the homeless women of Skid Row.
In residence for six weeks, Dawn will be completing a first draft of her novel Econoline, a book about poverty and class that interrogates the emotional costs of the American dream. She held her first reading and writing workshop on September 22nd.
On Tuesday, October 27, Dawn will host her second reading and writing workshop from 7-8 pm at the Cultural Center. Dawn will read a combination of fiction and essay for the first twenty minutes and then take questions from the audience. For the second half of the evening, Dawn will lead a guided writing exercise for participants. Sharing is optional, but bring a notebook! Workshop is free and open to all. Please come and help bid Dawn farewell, as she will be returning to Los Angeles at the end of October.
