July 2020 VoyageMIA Feature

Honored to be featured as an “Inspiring Local” on VoyageMIA in July 2020! Read part of the interview below, and get the full scoop HERE.

Dana, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My first memories are not where I was born, here in Miami, but in Lagos, Nigeria, where I moved with my family when I was four years old. After two years there, we went on to Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire for three years, and then Doula, Cameroon for one. When I was ten, we returned to Miami, and I remember that move being more of a culture shock than going to West Africa. Those years, I’m sure, influenced my love of travel, learning about different cultures, languages, and food. As an undergrad at FSU, I studied English and minored in film studies and Spanish literature; for a time, I thought I wanted to be a screenwriter (and I still want to write a screenplay… one day!), but before I could get any work in those areas, I moved to Spain to teach English. I did not write a lot while I was there, but I definitely had many adventures, including walking for almost two weeks on the Camino de Santiago.

I returned to the US to get my MA in English from UT Austin, with the idea of staying on to get a Ph.D. and teach English literature. That didn’t happen (mostly because I was sick of school and intimidated by the amount of work my friends in the Ph.D. program were doing) but I did get my MA and attempted to write my first novel… which I abandoned about 100 pages in. From 2012-2013, I lived and taught English in the Future Patagonia Park in Patagonia, Chile. Again, not much creative writing was done there, but a lot of living and learning. When I returned to the US at the end of 2013, this time it was home to Miami. For the next two years, I worked as a freelance journalist, copywriter, and editor. I grew as a writer but felt my dream of writing books slipping away, so I applied for an MFA in creative writing at the University of Miami and got in. I graduated in 2018 with a full novel draft and a determination to never stray from the writer’s path again. While at UM, I also received a 2016 Knight Arts Challenge Grant for PageSlayers, which provides free creative writing camps for kids based in in Opa-Locka and in partnership with the OLCDC.

Moving forward, I am now focusing on smaller-scale projects with PageSlayers, the most recent of which is SIDE x SIDE, a mail art project in collaboration with artist Elia Khalaf, EXILE Books, and the Little Haiti Cultural Center and which will take place summer 2021 and was funded by Oolite Arts through an Ellies Creator Award in 2019. SIDE x SIDE will showcase the connections between Opa-Locka and Little Haiti through mail art, where participants create works for their pen pals in other cities, then meet in person to create a zine together. (Learn more here: https://oolitearts.org/grant/dana-de-greff/)

Currently, I am a Visiting Professor of English at St. Thomas University and have taught creative writing classes with Books & Books in Miami, as well as online through the Loft Literary Center, and now on my own through zoom. I am working on getting my first novel, The Odyssey Hotel, published, and am also at work on my second novel, Everyday Mysticism. I have also published a chapbook of poems, Alterations, which was selected by Dan Vera and Ron Mohring as Number Eight in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. I’m the recipient of the 2018 Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award, and the 2017-2018 Literary Artist-in-Residence at the Deering Estate and I’ve been accepted or awarded scholarships from Tent: Creative Writing, the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, The Key West Literary Seminar, the Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany, and Hedgebrook. My work appears in or is forthcoming from The Citron Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, PANK, Origins Journal, Philadelphia Stories, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Gulf Stream Magazine and I am represented by Writers House.