Discipline/Field: Fiction

Based in: Los Angeles, CA

About: Dawn Dorland is an alumna of Harvard Divinity School and the MFA program at the University of Maryland. Her writing is concerned with the powerful politics of an American class system facing demographic and structural changes in the latter part of the twentieth century. At Yefe Nof she intends to complete work on the visual and voice-driven debut novel which she has been rigorously pursuing with the support of over a dozen national arts organizations.

Project Title: Econoline is an intergenerational and interracial novel of young Americans and recent immigrants rising up from rural poverty with ambition that masks their pasts of neglect and need. Set principally in a trailer court in a fictional 1990s Iowa corn town, it features a convergence of interconnected storylines about class that illustrates how some individuals and families make able ascents in the economy while others falter.

Econoline uses the voices of children who don’t often speak between the same book cover to complicate the assumption that arriving at a higher economic class comes without emotional cost, posing a new set of questions about the pressure and sacrifice inherent in the American dream.

Relevant links: Instagram and Twitter, @dawndorland. Parked URL at www.dawndorland.com.