DAKOTA CANON, AUTHOR
Dakota Canon is an award-winning author of novels, short stories, flash fiction, microfiction and poetry. Her work can be found in a variety of literary magazines such as Witness, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. Her first novel, The Unmaking of Eden, won the 2019 Caledonia Novel Award, the 2018 Hastings Litfest Crime Novel Competition and took 2nd place in the 2019 First Novel Prize, among other prizes. Find the first chapter here.
Her short fiction has earned a spot on Wigleaf's 2020 longlist of Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions and has been nominated for Best American Short Stories and Best Small Fictions, 2020. She has served on staff as a reader at Cease, Cows.
Dakota is represented by literary agent Claire Roberts of Claire Roberts Global Literary Management.
She lives in California with her husband, daughter and cat. You can often find her on her couch in her pajamas with a laptop and cat both fighting for the same space.
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Browse this site to find out more about her work.
UNLIKELY WRITER
Dakota Canon is a left-brained professional by day, masquerading as a right-brained artiste by night. She writes in secret, surreptitiously building characters in the dark and laying bricks to new worlds while her own world sleeps, insomnia her most faithful companion.
Few people know about her secret passion, and the ones who do have been more than a little surprised. "It's the last thing I would've expected from you" is a phrase Dakota's heard multiple times. She's all quantitative and analytical, not one most would mistake for having half a creative bone.
Yet she's been writing stories since she was a child. She enjoys playing God in this one forum where it actually works. She also really likes hanging out with her characters... maybe a little too much.
Her first long-ish story was penned by hand when she was seven. It took her nearly the whole of second grade to finish. When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Scientist was not only prescient, it also captured Dakota's essence perfectly: writer and scientist. Today she is both.
WHERE I WRITE
In bed or on my couch, cat on my lap. I need a soft, warm place to write. And silence. I need complete silence.
WHEN I WRITE
Late nights and weekend mornings. No regular schedule. I never could keep to one.
