J.R. Dawson
J.R. Dawson's debut, The First Bright Thing, is a Golden Crown award winner. Her shorter works are in places such as F&SF, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, and Lightspeed. Dawson lives on Dakota land in Minnesota with a loving spouse and three dogs. She is a professor at Drexel University's MFA program. Her second novel, The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, is a loose sapphic retelling of Orpheus, and releases from Tor in July 2025.
We had great fun chatting about how she quickly learned playwriting wasn't for her, and how she found her community writing short stories and novels. We also talk about the retelling of myths and legends, hear about the scary step of changing agents and much more!