Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the story collection Attempts at a Life, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, a collection forthcoming from Coffee House Press in April 2024. She also wrote the text interpolations in Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera and an illustrated nonfiction chapbook on fiction/visual art called A Picture Held Us Captive. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Conjunctions, The Brooklyn Rail, Music & Literature, Harper’s, BOMB, Fence, NOON, etc.

In 2009, Dutton co-founded, with Martin Riker, the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. The press was named for her great aunt Dorothy, a librarian, rose gardener, animal lover, and children’s book author who drove a station wagon through the backroads of Southern California, delivering books to rural desert communities. Over the years, Dorothy has published books by established innovative writers including Renee Gladman, Cristina Rivera Garza, Amina Cain, Nathalie Léger, and Leonora Carrington, and it launched the publishing careers of Nell Zink, Suzanne Scanlon, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Jen George, and Giada Scodellaro. Dutton does the cover and text design/composition for Dorothy’s books. In 2020, Riker and Dutton won the Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. 

From 2007-2011, Dutton was the production manager and book designer at Dalkey Archive Press, where she designed for many titles, including: Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, Autoportrait and Suicide by Édouard Levé, Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, Alix’s Journal by Alix Cléo Roubaud, JR and The Recognitions by William Gaddis, and Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse.

Agent: Cynthia Cannell

Image: Portrait of the author as a monster, done by a kid she knows