Dawn Marano is president and senior editor of Dawn Marano & Associates, LLC, which provides literary consulting and developmental editing services for authors of book-length works of fiction and nonfiction. Before starting Dawn Marano & Associates, she served as an acquisitions and developmental editor at the University of Utah Press for more than six years. While there, several of the authors with whom she worked—such as Mark Spragg, Chris Chester, Catherine Mansell Mayo, Elizabeth Dodd, and Sheryl St. Germain—received well-deserved national attention, including literary prizes and reviews in Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, The Women's Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review.

Marano is also a co-author (with W. Scott Olsen, Wendy Bishop, and Douglas Carlson) of When We Say We’re Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory, a work of literary nonfiction. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in several publications including the anthologies The Sacred Place: Witnessing the Holy in the Physical World (University of Utah 1996), and In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal from W. W. Norton & Company. Her memoir, Trusting the Edge, won the Utah Arts Council Original Writing Competition for Nonfiction Book in 2005, and her work has been also cited among Notable Essays in The Best American Essays.

Marano often makes reading and teaching appearances at academic and regional writing conferences, speaking on topics pertinent to the craft of writing and to editing and publishing nonfiction.

When she's not at her desk staring down the words on a sheet of paper, she can often be found at the local ice skating arena. A star of Ice Capades and an Ice Angel on the “Donny and Marie” Osmond television show in her youth, she has reconnected with her first love, a pristine sheet of ice, and is currently training for the 2007 U.S. Adult Figure Skating Championship.

Dawn Marano will participate in the panel discussion “Going Local: Connecting Local Publishers and Writers” on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2 pm, in the Salt Lake City Main Library, 4th Floor Conference Room.