Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon
Chaon at the 2009 Texas Boox Festival
Born	1964 Sidney, Nebraska
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Northwestern University Syracuse University
Genre	Fiction
Notable works	Await Your Reply Among the Missing
Notable awards	2006 Academy Award for Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters Finalist, National Magazine Award in Fiction Finalist, National Book Award
Website
http://www.danchaon.com

Dan Chaon is an American writer. He is the author of three short story collections and two novels, including Among the Missing, which was a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon's stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and Literature.

Chaon was adopted and grew up in a village of 20 people outside of Sidney, Nebraska. His father was a construction worker and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. As a middle schooler, Chaon wrote a fan letter to Ray Bradbury, beginning a correspondence that continued for several years. Chaon graduated from Northwestern and received his MFA from Syracuse. He was married to the late writer Sheila Schwartz and has two teenage sons. He lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, where he has worked with such students as Ishmael Beah, Emma Straub, and Lena Dunham.

Chaon's first novel was You Remind Me of Me (2004). His short-story collections Fitting Ends (1996) and Among the Missing (2001) were both well-received; the latter was named as one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association, as a notable book of the year by The New York Times, and was a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award. Await Your Reply, a novel published in 2009, was described by the Los Angeles Times as a "riveting thriller, chock-full of plot twists, and a sober meditation on the erosion of identity in the age of technology." Chaon's 2012 short story collection, Stay Awake, was a finalist for The Story Prize.