Dawn Raffel is a writer, editor, and creative writing teacher. Her most recent book, Boundless as the Sky, came out in January, 2023. In a starred advance review, Publishers Weekly wrote, "Raffel draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the history of Chicago’s 1933 World's Fair for this sublime collection.... This profile of a city within a city creates a Russian nesting doll of urban tableaux.... This is one to savor." The Chicago Tribune called it "marvelous and arresting.”

Her previous book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, was chosen as one of NPR’s best books of 2018 and awarded a 2019 Christopher Award for books that affirm the highest values of the human spirit. Her other books include a novel, Carrying the Body; two critically acclaimed story collections,  Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division, and a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, which was a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. 

She was a senior-level magazine editor for many years and helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine, where she served as Executive Articles Editor. In addition, she served as Editor of The Literarian, the literary journal of the Center for Fiction in New York, and most recently as the Fiction Editor of Northwest Review. In March of 2024, she was the keynote speaker at the University of Strasbourg’s conference on Spatial Imagination in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature and Art.

She has taught at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, The New York Public Library, Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Tblisi, Montreal), and International Literary Seminars (Nairobi and Lamu, Kenya). She serves as an emerging writer mentor at the Center for Fiction in New York and for AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs).