:: dawna kemper ::

:: dawna kemper ::

 

published fiction

“The Parting” ~ Santa Monica Review, Fall 2005 

“Say the Word” ~ The Idaho Review, Vol X., 2008

“Appomattox” ~ Colorado Review, Summer 2008 

“Close” ~ The Florida Review, Winter 2008 

“Dialectics” ~ Pearl, Spring 2009 

“Rondo” ~ Santa Monica Review, Fall 2009

“Wake” ~ The Kenyon Review, Summer 2010 

“Curses” ~ Quarterly West, Issue 69 / Winter 2010

“Trophy” ~ forthcoming in Shenandoah

“Translator” ~ forthcoming in Shenandoah

“Joshua Tree” ~ forthcoming in Zyzzyva

{To read excerpts, click here.}

recognitions

~ Pushcart Prize nomination

~ Listed as “Notable” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 (Dave Eggers, editor)

~ Bevel Summers Prize finalist


past events/readings

New Short Fiction Series ~ “Hotel Minerva” ~ Feb. 2012

Library Girl ~ “Resurrection” ~ April 2012


. . .


Dawna Kemper's short stories celebrate the elegantly willful confusion of reality for empathy, cause and effect for sometimes dangerous wish fulfillment, and the complications of our responsibility for imagination. In some fiction of the surreal, that is a clumsily obvious or too-pretty place. Not here. “Why does he have to keep dying?” asks one of Kemper's characters, reminding us of what is starkly too-real even as we shiver in delight. Kemper's imaginative worldview and the startling particulars of the world her characters inhabit -- of music, animals, the terrible logic of beauty -- exercise both the power of fables about people like us, and the fascination of studying what turns out to be ourselves.

~  Andrew Tonkovich, editor, Santa Monica Review, and host of Bibliocracy



In Dawna Kemper’s fantastic stories, hummingbird and bear, lioness and crow, have equal billing with men and women. Through these characters, Kemper’s fiction investigates essential mysteries about the nature of time, identity and perception. The landscapes in these stories feel like dreams or fairytales, but the characters and the questions they ask (How did I get here? What is my purpose? Who am I?) are always exquisitely real.

~ Mary Rechner, author of Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women: Stories



Dawna Kemper creates work of exquisite discomfort, something like seeing small birds sewn, still living, onto a tapestry. Part vision and part myth, her stories reopen that unprotected part of us so we can notice again how strange the world really is. Read these, then, and wonder.

~ Jim Krusoe, author of Toward You, and Iceland




Bella [© d. kemper]

home :: bio :: stories :: news :: links :: contact