- THE STORY BEHIND THE STORIES
She Published Her First Piece at Nine. She Hasn't Stopped Since.
Dawn Reno Langley is many things: a novelist, an essayist, an educator, a Fulbright Scholar, a TEDx speaker, a mosaic artist, a traveler, and a tireless advocate for the stories that rarely get told. But above all, she is a writer.
Where It All Began
“I was in third grade when my essay questioning the possibility of a nuclear strike on American soil ran in our local newspaper. Looking back, I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the questions no one else wanted to ask.”
Born an Army brat to a WWII and Korea veteran, Dawn grew up surrounded by stories, real ones, the kind that shape nations and break families. Her favorite place was the local library. She would check out the maximum number of books allowed and carry them home, stopping at her grandmother’s along the way. By the time she graduated to the imposing main library on Broadway, she had found, as she describes it, ‘heaven.’
That library obsession became a writing vocation. Her essay on the Cuban Missile Crisis, published when she was nine years old, announced what would become a half-century career: writing about the things that matter, the questions that unsettle, and the people who get overlooked.
- A LIFE IN WRITING
From a Nine-Year-Old Journalist to an International Literary Voice
Age 9 · 1960s
First published piece — an essay on the Cuban Missile Crisis in a local upstate New York newspaper. The writer begins.
1984 – 1990
First books published — the Jenny series for children (Jenny Moves, Jenny's First Friend) — before completing a college degree. Over 100 articles written for national antiques and arts publications.
1990
BA in Liberal Arts, Johnson State College — graduated Summa Cum Laude and Salutatorian. Fiction Award, Department of Writing and Literature. Outstanding Alumni Award, 1999.
1991 – 1996
Twelve nonfiction books published — including American Indian Collectibles (Random House), The Encyclopedia of Black Collectibles (Chilton), and Contemporary Native American Artists. Short fiction and poetry published widely in literary magazines.
MFA · 1996
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Fiction, Vermont College. Critical thesis on women writers and their journals. The craft foundation for everything that followed.
2000 · Pushcart
First Pushcart Prize nomination (fiction). Short stories published in Futures, TRQ Magazine, and Moondance. Loving Marie and After Always released. The UnOfficial Guide to eBay and The UnOfficial Guide to Time Management published by Macmillan.
PhD · 2010
PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (Humanities and Culture), The Union Institute and University. Dissertation: Writing the Transgendered Self: Analyzing the Prescotts. Scholar as much as storyteller.
The Full Story
Dawn Reno Langley writes full-time from wherever she is in the world, writing the stories that have ‘rattled around in my head every day of my life.’
Her body of work spans genres and generations. Her novels center on social dilemmas: civil rights issues and interracial relationships in The Art of Rivers series; the crisis of an elephant sanctuary in Thailand (The Mourning Parade); the fragility of family mythology (Analyzing the Prescotts); and the environmental cost of human ambition (The Silver Dolphin). Her nonfiction includes landmark works on Native American and African American art and antiques, and her spiritual exploration You Are Divine: A Search for the Goddess in All of Us (Llewellyn, 2022) examines the divine feminine across world cultures.
She is also a poet, an essayist, a theater critic, a mosaic artist, and an educator. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Hunger Mountain, The Missouri Review, The Oklahoma Review, The Provo Canyon Review, and Superstition Review.
As a Fulbright Scholar, Dawn has carried her work beyond American borders. She is a nomad, living her life wherever she travels to, and the places she visits always find their way into her stories. The Algarve, Luxembourg, and London are favorites; Kenya, Thailand, Islamabad, and St. Kitts have left deeper marks.
- MFA in Fiction Vermont College of Fine Arts
- PhD The Union Institute and University
- Fulbright Scholar
- TEDx Speaker
“Each story centers on a social dilemma, and I never write a story about which I have no passion. If it doesn’t matter to me, it won’t matter to the reader.”
She believes literature can change minds. She has watched it happen in classrooms, at readings, at the kitchen tables of readers who write to tell her a book of hers broke something open in them. That, she says, is why the work matters.
Dawn writes to give voice to the overlooked. Whether it’s fighting for Asian elephants in Thailand or tracing the history of African American collectibles, whether it’s exploring the divine feminine across world religions or untangling the complicated web of a Southern family’s secrets, her work always begins in the same place: a question she believes needs asking.
Start Reading
Explore Dawn’s complete catalog of 30+ books, or unlock free chapters and stories in the Reading Library.