Newest News:-)
My newest manuscript will be going out on submission to editors at publishing houses very soon! Emotionally resonant and masterfully tense, this is a story of survival in the face of grief and trauma and a testament to the redemptive power of love.
I’m also continuing to work on the final draft of a short story/flash fiction collection THE GOOD MOTHER AND OTHER STORIES (working title) after being awarded a 2026 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts! I’m incredibly grateful and thankful to the Canada Council for the Arts for their continued support of my work and their belief in me as a writer! @CanadaCouncil @BringingTheArtsToLife
I am also extremely thankful and honoured to be a recipient of Ontario Arts Council grants to enable me to work on my current writing project. I am SO grateful to live in a country and province that values the arts!
Other News: I’m thrilled to announce that I received a Letter of Distinction from mentor Marina Endicott, a Giller Prize finalist, at the Humber School for Writers where I completed a Creative Writing Graduate Certificate in April, 2025.
I’m also honoured to announce my story “Pack” placed 2nd in the 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award contest! This is a dream competition, and I’m so grateful my story was chosen as the runner up! The amazingly talented Sarah Freligh judged this year’s contest, and I was overwhelmed by her kind comments:
Second Place: Pack
Everything in this story – from the title to the last words – establishes and then supports the conceit of these teenage girls as something feral and predatory, something to be feared and obeyed or else: “our power a warning, a thirst, a howl echoing in the sky.” The title “Pack,” with its evocation of survival in numbers, sets the table so effectively for the feast that follows and the plural first-person point of view of the collective “we” is the perfect vehicle to drive that notion. Paired early on with verbs like “prowl” and “scuttles,” the reader is immediately dropped into a world of mock-or-be-mocked and each repetition of “we” and what they do to maintain their place in the pecking order raises the stakes and deepens and expands the characterization of this group. I love, too, how, in the last paragraph, the girls finally morph into animals with their “tuffs of down, thick as cream”—I swear I can smell the blood on their whiskers! Above all, there’s something universal at work here, something that speaks uneasily to the present day where cruelty rules and kindness is something weak, an underbelly to be attacked for its hopeful vulnerability.
Stay tuned for more exciting news! All the best to all the readers and writers out there!
Dawn x
Dawn Miller