About Dana

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and though I haven’t lived there in a long while, I remain in a love affair with the city, London too, if I’m being precise. Both places feel like they know me, and both break my heart in their own way. I often think that if you know when and where I grew up, that’s all you really need to know about me. It will tell you most of what’s important anyway. The years I’ve spent far away from Chicago, in Taipei, Hong Kong, the Pacific Northwest, and many other places, have only been additives to what was formed long ago by family poker nights, neighborhood aunties, and trips down south to visit family who’d declined the Great Migration and stayed put in Louisiana.

From childhood through college, I wrote, until one day on Princeton’s campus, a gray-haired man with a scarf wrapped high around his neck told me, “You’re doing it wrong.” The hair and scarf, and the confidence with which he spoke, suggested to my young self that he knew something I didn’t. I had been raised by a man who had ten sisters and who believed women held up more than half the sky. It had never occurred to me that I could write “wrong,” outside of the hard work of craft, that is. Anyway, the man offered up a couple of authors he found compelling and bounded off across campus while I stood there with my confidence pooling around my feet. I didn’t seriously attempt to write again until a few years ago. Was it age, wisdom, time, a rare alignment of stars that flipped the switch? I don’t know. I just know that I felt it again, and so I began again; figuring out the intimacy of the stories I want to tell, gradually turning up the lights until it’s all bright, and brutal, and real, and I can write about what’s underneath.

Aside from all of this, I like thunderclouds and forests, and don’t much care for sunshine unless it’s cold outside. I’ll hike with you in summer, but it’ll be all sweaty, and I’d at least like to see a giant lizard or beaver or something to make up for it.

I’m a docent-in-training at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. My training will be complete in 2024.