Dina Peone (she/they) is a trauma-informed writer, professor, and personal writing coach from Saugerties, New York.

She is at work on her first book: a memoir about the seventy-two days she spent in a medically induced coma following a house fire that nearly killed her and her sister when they were teenagers, leaving them both severely burned, although to different degrees, and the conversation they are only beginning to have about their relative losses and survival, twenty years later.

A graduate of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (‘18), Dina designs and teaches a broad range of innovative nonfiction writing courses tailored to her students’ interests, online and in-person throughout the Hudson Valley.

Previously she taught nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, where she received an Outstanding Teaching Award (nominated by her students).

Dina pioneered the University of Iowa’s first-ever online course in creative nonfiction, two years before the pandemic.

Additionally, she has taught writing at the University of Chicago, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Buckley School, the Westchester County Correctional Facility, and various high schools in rural Iowa.

She was the Spring 2026 Writer in Residence at SUNY New Paltz, where she taught her signature course on the literary aesthetics of trauma narratives.

She was also the Summer 2020 Writer in Residence at the Jack Kerouac House, and a Visiting Writer in the 2018 Writer’s Village at Sarah Lawrence College.

Dina is the recipient of the Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry, the Gail Godwin Honorary Award for Writers, the Ron Marquette Writer’s Scholarship, The Allan and Whitney Blake Manings Scholarship for Creative Writing, a Writer-in-Residence Award from the University of Iowa, and more.

Her debut work of cultural criticism on horror icon Freddy Krueger was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected for the Editor’s Choice Award by The Lascaux Review.

In June 2020, legendary rock critic and founding reviews editor of Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, featured Dina’s essay about her karaoke upbringing in the LA Review of Books, #6 in his time-honored culture column, “Real Life Rock Top Ten.”

In 2023, Dina edited and wrote an introductory essay to New Icons, the world’s first fine art exhibition catalogue featuring realist paintings of burn survivors by Seattle-based artist Grace Athena Flott. 

Dina’s work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Narratively, Bat City Review, The Sarah Lawrence Review, Poor Yorick, Iowa Alumni Magazine, Swamp Ape Review, and others. She is the founding editor of the Cliffhanger., a pocket-sized anthology devoted to the fragment.

Excerpts from her unpublished memoir have been anthologized by the 2018 SAT Reading: World Literature Practice Book and Hippocampus Magazine and Books.

When she’s not writing for herself, she writes creative copy for Emmy award-winning directors at the next-gen production company, ArtClass.  

Dina is represented by Kate Garrick of Salky Literary Agency.

Follow Dina on Instagram @dinapeone.