Born in central Texas and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Dana studied poetry at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and dove into the D.C. writing scene to find company and guidance in the sometimes isolating experience of putting pen to paper. Since then, she spent two years living and writing in Santiago, Chile – and is now based in Dublin, Ireland.
Dana’s debut poetry collection, The Dark Dance (released in 2023), explores how a shared thread of compulsivity can link drinking behavior, intimacy, identity, and the almost manic process of healing through the vehicle of writing. You can read about her writing process here.
Dana’s work is most heavily influenced by the confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, though many other poets have had a profound impact on her—to name a few, Margaret Atwood, Melissa Broder, Andrea Gibson, and Sharon Olds. She is inspired by ecopoetics, surrealism, psychoanalytic theory, psychological horror, and spoken word, and likes to experiment with shape, ekphrastic, and found poetry. She is drawn to the juxtaposition of poem and photograph—all photos on this website are her own.
Dana’s poems have been featured in AVATAR, the Hill Rag, the”Nyx” and “Severin” issues of Abridged, and iNK BLOTS, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. She has also published collaborative poetry in Under the Basho and Failed Haiku: A Journal of English Senryu.
Outside of poetry, Dana maintains an educational blog on alcohol sobriety called SomeLikeItSober.com.
Dana was featured in two poetry readings hosted by Lost City Books that featured the D.C. Poetry Collective’s two iNK BLOTS anthologies. Check her out at 17:05 in the recording from August 2021 and at 28:30 in the recording from February 2021.
Dana Gittings 