Dan Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, and grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional Elm Haven in 1991s SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002s A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art.

Dan received his Masters in Education from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971. He then worked in elementary education for 18 years -- 2 years in Missouri, 2 years in Buffalo, New York -- one year as a specially trained BOCES resource teacher and another as a sixth-grade teacher -- and 14 years in Colorado.


ABOUT DAN
Biographic Sketch



His last four years in teaching were spent creating, coordinating, and teaching in APEX, an extensive gifted/talented program serving 19 elementary schools and some 15,000 potential students. During his years of teaching, he won awards from the Colorado Education Association and was a finalist for the Colorado Teacher of the Year. He also worked as a national language-arts consultant, sharing his own Writing Well curriculum which he had created for his own classroom. Eleven and twelve-year-old students in Simmons regular 6th-grade class averaged junior-year in high school writing ability according to annual standardized and holistic writing assessments. Whenever someone says writing cant be taught, Dan begs to differ and has the track record to prove it. Since becoming a full-time writer, Dan likes to visit college writing classes, has taught in New Hampshires Odyssey writing program for adults, and is considering hosting his own Windwalker Writers Workshop.

Dans first published story appeared on Feb. 15, 1982, the day his daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born. Hes always attributed that coincidence to helping in keeping things in perspective when it comes to the relative impor