dina Peone
writer. editor. educator.
Dina Peone is a writer, performer, and professor from Saugerties, New York. Raised on karaoke and ghost stories, she identifies as an "exhibitionist of horrors." She is at work on her first book: a memoir about escaping a house fire with severe burns when she was a morbid teenager.
Dina studied writing and theater at Sarah Lawrence before earning her MFA at the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (’18). As a graduate student, she began designing and teaching innovative nonfiction courses inspired by her liberal arts education and some of her earliest students nominated her to receive an Outstanding Teaching Award. She also received fellowships to teach “master classes” in writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (NY) and taught students visiting Iowa from The Buckley School (CA). In addition to teaching undergraduates in the Midwest and on both American coasts, Dina has taught PhD students from around the world and high school students from rural Iowa high schools.
Upon completion of her MFA, UIowa hired her as a Visiting Assistant Professor to teach the Nonfiction Writing Program’s first-ever online course. Simultaneously, she joined UChicago’s Program in Creative Writing as a part-time Lecturer.
At UChicago, Dina teaches a broad range of nonfiction courses tailored to her students’ interests, all of which test the boundaries of the genre: beginning/advanced workshops, technical seminars, and thesis workshops. Her interests include the mercurial form of the essay; trauma narratives; disabled studies; queer studies; performance studies; coming-of-age stories; antiracist creative writing pedagogy; narrative psychology and philosophy.
Dina has received numerous awards for her writing, including: The Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry; a Writer-in-Residence Award at the University of Iowa and the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida; the Allan and Whitney Blake Manings Scholarship for Creative Writing; The Ron Marquette Writer’s Scholarship; The Gail Godwin Honorary Award for Writers; and more.
Dina's first work of cultural criticism "Freddy Krueger is Not Real: the Dream of a Burn Survivor" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized as the Editor's Choice Award by The Lascaux Review.
Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Narratively, Bat City Review, The Sarah Lawrence Review, Poor Yorick, Iowa Alumni Magazine, Swamp Ape Review, and others. Excerpts from her memoir-in-progress have been anthologized by Hippocampus Magazine and Books and the 2018 SAT Reading: World Literature Practice Book.
In June 2020, legendary rock critic and founding reviews editor of Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, featured Dina’s personal essay about her karaoke upbringing in the LA Review of Books, #6 in his time-honored culture column, “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” When she’s not writing for herself, she writes creative copy for Emmy award-winning directors at the next-gen production company, ArtClass.
The founding editor of the Cliffhanger., a pocket-sized anthology devoted to the fragment, Dina recently edited New Icons, the art exhibition catalogue featuring realist paintings of burn survivors by Seattle-based artist Grace Athena Flott.
As of the pandemic, she is also the creator of DEAR GHOSTFINGERS: an experimental advice column that uses literature and an otherworldly persona to address existential issues.
Dina has volunteered for McCormick and Williams Literary Agency and many literary magazines including The Iowa Review. She has hosted several student reading series and hosts public readings from time to time. She has taught free workshops open to the public and coached aspiring writers.
Dina is represented by Kate Garrick of Salky Literary Agency. You can follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram @dinapeone. Find her Officially on Facebook.