Daniel A. Hoyt’s debut novel, This Book Is Not for You, won the inaugural Dzanc Fiction Prize and will be published on November 7, 2017. Dan’s first short story collection, Then We Saw the Flames, won the 2008 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Dan’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and other literary magazines.

Dan teaches creative writing, mainly fiction, and lit classes, such as The Literature of Rock and Roll, at Kansas State University. Dan lives in Manhattan, Kansas, where he co-parents his son.

Dan received his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas and his M.A. and B.J. at the University of Missouri. He taught for six years at Baldwin-Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, during the aughts, and for much of the 1990s, he worked as a journalist — at newspapers in Missouri, Wisconsin, and upstate New York.

When he’s not reading or writing, Dan likes to cook, go on walks, listen to music, work out, and ride his mountain bike out by the KAW River. For the last four years and counting, Dan has organized the Rock and Roll Reading at AWP, the annual creative writing conference that is loved and loathed, sometimes simultaneously.

Dan drinks a lot of coffee. He prefers the Stones to the Beatles and Guided by Voices to the Stones. He probably has more scars than you. He, still, does not consider himself a cat person.

Dan is a hamster person.