Dan White

• PhD in English--Creative Writing (Fiction), University of Illinois-Chicago, 2026
• MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction), Otis College, 2020
• JD, Southwestern Law School, 2018
• BA in European History, Roosevelt University, 2014

Dan White is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and Publisher of Indirect Books. He received his Ph.D. in Fiction from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Otis College. His criticism and prose appear in 3:AM, The Florida Review, New Critique, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He teaches graduate seminars in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University.

His PhD work centered around a single protagonist, Emily, within a reimagined Hamlet. The first project in the progression, The Nunnery, is set in contemporary Chicago and California and charged by a search for the depths to which narrational movement can verisimilarly render lived inner experience. That manuscript was recently longlisted by Yes Yes Books. In the meantime, he is at work on a new project, a campus novel following that same character, Emily, a bit earlier in life, when things weren’t quite so complex. In the critical realm he is working on a scholarly manuscript studying the use of narration in Rachel Cusk’s books, centered on narrative theory, Wittgenstein, and feminism.

In addition to his work with Indirect and L’Esprit, he has served as the Prose Editor for West Trade Review literary journal since 2020. He also serves as the Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions, which he helped launch in 2023. Outside of the novel form, he writes short fiction, book reviews, and critical essays. His work has appeared in Florida Review, 3:AM, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications.

His literary tastes gravitate towards fearless, verisimilar, consciousness-forward writing in the High Modernist tradition. While reading, he tends to keep the opening sentence of Mrs Dalloway close at hand, as it is tattooed on his arm. He especially enjoys innovative, intelligent third-person fiction and is wary of first-person present tense. Literature that entangles philosophy, especially that of language and experience, often resonates. He is further drawn to unorthodox and sophisticated uses of free-indirect style and other techniques for rendering inner life; work that takes risks, that displays understanding of theory, and that plays with time, memory, and freely-associative thought; quotidian realities of life; and anything in the wonderfully chaotic stream-of-consciousness quartier.

Alongside Mrs Dalloway, some of his favorite books include Pride and Prejudice, The Sound and The Fury, Speedboat, Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, The Last Supper, and Parade, Annie Ernaux’s Passion Simple, Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere, Marguerite Duras’ Emily L., Anna Burns’ Milkman, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, George Gissing’s New Grub Street, Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Aysegül Savaş’ White on White, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds and, bien sûr, Ulysses.

His research areas include stylistics, narratology, novel theory, narrative / narrational theory, Modernism, feminism, poetics, and the history of the novel form. His PhD exam work focused on Modernist form in the novel and its intersection with contemporary fiction, including conversations around subjectivity and autofiction; the work of High Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; and the novels of Rachel Cusk. His first book, Rachel Cusk and the Art of Narration, will be published in November 2026.