Dana Wall | Stories & Scripts

"Crafting worlds where the extraordinary feels inevitable"

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Dana Wall is a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Manhattan Beach, California.

Her literary work appears in Brevity, Tupelo Quarterly, River Teeth: Beautiful Things, Hunger Mountain, Columbia Journal (contest winner), Strange Horizons, The Maine Review, Necessary Fiction, and SWWIM, among others. She has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination.

Her screenplay The Erasure won at the Global Film Festival Awards, and The Van Cleef Chronicles was a finalist at the Big Apple Film Festival and selected for the Alpine International Film Festival. Additional screenwriting honors include finalist recognition at Cannes World Film Festival for Three Ice Cubes and semi-finalist placements at Santa Barbara International Screenplay Awards and Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Dana holds an MFA from Goddard College, a Psychology degree, MBA, and CPA credentials. She spent fifteen years managing financial operations in Hollywood before transitioning to full-time creative writing in 2022. She co-authors children’s books with her daughter Amber and specializes in high-concept literary adaptations, psychological thrillers, and character-driven drama that explores memory, transformation, and the spaces between realism and the uncanny.

Locusmag.com reviewed my Strange Horizons poem “Customer Service Representative’s Notes on Soul Processing”.

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=55742&preview=1&_ppp=7a97f88458

Strange Horizons kicked off June with an issue including Dana Wall’s “Customer Service Repre­sentative’s Notes on Soul Processing”, a poem that explores an afterlife in which people are judged not by a divinity exactly, but by an algorithm – a computer program that can review a person’s life and give them a score and options for what their actions have earned them in terms of what comes next. It makes Heaven into a kind of help desk, assisting souls as much as the system allows. The piece seems to build up a vision of the afterlife that mirrors what humans have built on Earth, the bureaucracies and limitations surrounding aid, where decisions are rarely transparent and instead reside behind legalese, giving the illusion of choice without feeling freeing. It’s a fascinating poem.

Thank you Vanessa Jae, poetry editor for Strange Horizons for letting me know.

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