Dina Peone studied writing at Sarah Lawrence before earning her MFA in nonfiction at the University of Iowa. Upon completion of her MFA, she joined UIowa as a Visiting Assistant Professor, where she now teaches their first-ever online course in creative nonfiction. Dina has received numerous awards for her teaching and writing, including an Outstanding Teaching Award, The Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize nomination for a personal essay about Freddy Krueger. She is the founding editor of the Cliffhanger., a pocket-sized anthology devoted to the fragment, and an editorial assistant for The Iowa Review. Her most recent essay appears in DINE, an anthology about roadside diners from Hippocampus Magazine and Books. Dina is at work on her first book, a memoir about burning almost to death in a house fire when she was a morbid teenager. She is the Summer 2020 Writer-in-Residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida.