Dawna Kemper's stories have appeared in the Colorado Review, The Idaho Review, The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review, Pearl, Quarterly West and The Santa Monica Review.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was listed as "Notable" in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, edited by Dave Eggers.  Kemper teaches and works as an editor, including serving for five years as the editorial assistant at The Santa Monica Review.  A Los Angeles resident, when not bemoaning the untimely passing of the Oxford comma, she also, sometimes, make art and connects with readers at www.dawnakemper.com.

"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  "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  "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.…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