Jack Dann was born on February 15,1945 and is an American writer best known for his science fiction, as well as an editor and a writing teacher, who has lived in Australia since 1994.
38 Facts About Jack Dann
2.
Jack Dann has published over seventy books, the majority being as editor or co-editor of story anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres.
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Jack Dann has published nine novels, numerous shorter works of fiction, essays, and poetry, and his books have been translated into thirteen languages.
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Jack Dann was born to a Jewish family in New York State in 1945 and grew up in Johnson City, New York.
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Jack Dann was considered unlikely to survive by his doctors, and spent four months recovering in hospital, at one stage sharing a ward with members of the Mafia who had been injured in a gun battle.
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Jack Dann was awarded a BA in social and political science in 1968 from Binghamton University and later undertook postgraduate studies in law at St John's Law School from 1969 to 1971.
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Jack Dann lived in Binghamton for much of the next 30 years.
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Jack Dann had previously sold a story to Damon Knight for Orbit, but this took almost two years to be published.
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Jack Dann published his first book as editor, Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1974, and his first novel, Starhiker, in 1977.
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Jack Dann has since collaborated with Webb on several writing and editing projects and the couple are well known in Australian speculative fiction culture.
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Jack Dann's dissertation was titled "Shadows in the Stone and a Study of Historical Divergence".
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Jack Dann was editor of the SFWA Bulletin from 1970 to 1975.
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Jack Dann has been a consulting editor for Tor Books since 1994.
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Jack Dann's anthologies tend to be prefaced by his essays on the theme of the anthology and the writers represented therein.
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Jack Dann co-edited, with Grania Davidson Davis, Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit, a collection of short fiction by Avram Davidson, a Hugo and multi World Fantasy Award-winning Jewish American writer of science fiction, fantasy and crime, which was published in October 2000.
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Jack Dann has published, as editor, a further volume of Australian speculative fiction Dreaming Again, anthologies of Nebula Award winning stories, and many other anthologies, both singularly and in collaboration with others.
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Jack Dann reworked this tale for some years through a number of drafts, publishing a further section entitled "Islands of Time" in Fantastic in September 1977.
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Jack Dann is working on a sequel entitled Ghost Dance with author Barbara Delaplace.
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Jack Dann later employs some of his military inventions during a battle in the Middle East, while in the service of a Syrian general - events which Dann projects into a year of da Vinci's life about which little is known.
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Jack Dann is propelled into an arduous and confronting journey into the Amazon Jungle, in search of a rumored miracle working physician.
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Jack Dann has published poetry in collections, magazines, in the form of poetry postcards and a chapbook Christs and Other Poems.
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Jack Dann's stories are sometimes reminiscent in style to the work of Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges and can be complex and challenging to the reader, with a considerable sense of mystery.
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Jack Dann is known for his meticulous and extensive research of his subjects and their relevant setting, which has been a salient feature of his alternative history novels such as The Memory Cathedral, The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean and The Silent.
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Jack Dann has suggested that 'writer's block' is not necessarily a negative experience, but an invitation from the subconscious to conduct more research, either through study, or through gathering and processing further life experiences, thus refilling the subconscious pool of material to fuel further creative work.
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Jack Dann studied in Method acting in the 1960s, a technique which involves total immersion into a character's life, experiences, habits and outlook, and parallels this propensity for in depth research.
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Jack Dann has made links between this training and his approach to developing his fictional characters.
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Jack Dann advocates the development of writing technique through rigorous writing workshops, where emerging writers are guided by established writers, which he feels is a fast track to gaining a professional writing style.
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Jack Dann has linked this preoccupation with his experience of coming close to death as a young man, following his hospitalisation in 1965, which he claims had a similar transformational effect on his character.
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Jack Dann is notable in the science fiction field for having written a number of stories with Jewish themes.
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Jack Dann has a Jewish background, and although affirming an affinity with the cultural aspects of this, has distanced himself from the theological tenets of Judaism due to his atheist outlook.
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Jack Dann has suggested particular influence from Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his 'down and out' days in Paris in the early 1920s, A Moveable Feast.
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Jack Dann read this book during his convalescence from life-threatening illness in 1965, a key character forming event in his personal history.
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Jack Dann has frequently attended conventions, as guest of honour, speaker and panelist, and has played an active role in encouraging the development of the field, including running and contributing to seminars and workshops on writing, such as Clarion South.
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Jack Dann has raised the profile of Australian writers by publishing anthologies of their work.
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Jack Dann has been honoured by the Mark Twain Society.
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Jack Dann has been shortlisted for major science fiction and fantasy awards on numerous occasions.
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Jack Dann is listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who's Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who's Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets, United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; the Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who's Who in the World.
38.
The Man Who Melted Jack Dann is a word game inspired by Jack Dann's book The Man Who Melted.