Robin WyattDunn

Robin Wyatt Dunn is a poet, novelist, and independent filmmaker working in Los Angeles, where he has lived since 2009. Born in Jackson, Wyoming in 1979 and raised in Houston, he studied at Fordham (BA, 2001), the University of Texas at Austin (MA, 2004), and Chapman University (MFA, 2015). In 2017 he was a finalist for Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.

Dunn is highly prolific across poetry, novels, novellas, and short fiction, with more than thirty books and chapbooks to his name. Among them are My Name Is Dee (2013), Line to Night Island (2014), Julia, Skydaughter (2015), Black Dove (with Barbara Sobczynska, 2016), 2DEE (2017), This isn't one of the stories I remember (2018), Some Dredged Deep (2020), Death Songs (2020), City, Winter (2020), Refugees from America (2021), and If This Document Should Survive (2022). His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Atticus Review, Gone Lawn, The Massachusetts Review, Star*Line, Litro, B O D Y, and The Metaworker, among many other journals. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and has written and directed three independent feature films: A Wilderness in Your Heart (2007), Party Games (2009), and American Messenger (2015).

For JEF he wrote Science Fiction: A Poem! (2017), a book-length poem whose unreliable narrator lashes out at aliens, America, and closer enemies of the mind and heart. The poet Martin Ott read it as a love poem disguised as a hate poem; Howie Good praised its variety of poetic forms, styles, and voices. Across his work, extraterrestrial imagery and first-contact tropes serve as vehicles for political and emotional commentary, a surrealist charge Dunn traces to influences running from Gene Wolfe and China Mieville to Bukowski, Fante, Whitman, and Keats.

Start with Science Fiction: A Poem!. It is his only JEF title and the cleanest entry into the speculative, Los Angeles-grounded surrealism that runs through everything else.