Nancy Dafoe Fiction
 

ABOUT

NANCY AVERY DAFOE

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Nancy Avery Dafoe is a published writer and poet with fifteen published books, in addition to being an English educator living in Central New York. Her short stories and poems have been published in a variety of literary magazines and online sites. In addition to her murder mystery novels, You Enter a Room, Both End in Speculation, and Murder on Ponte Vecchio, Dafoe has a novella Naimah and Ajmal on Newton's Mountain published. She has also written a hybrid memoir and poetry book on dealing with Alzheimer’s in her family through SUNY Press: An Iceberg in Paradise: A Passage through Alzheimer’s. The book’s manuscript was a finalist in the 2013 William Faulkner/William Wisdom Creative Writing competition, non-fiction category.

 

Socrates is Dead Again, a recent novel, won GOLD in the 2023 Human Relations Indie Book Awards and was a finalist in the 2015 William Faulkner/Wisdom novel manuscript competition. Murder on Ponte Vecchio was also a Faulkner competition finalist in its manuscript form.

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Her latest novel, Yet in the Land of the Living, comes out in December 2024. 

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Her second novel in the Vena Goodwin murder mystery series--Both End in Speculation--was released in September 2018 in paperback and eBook formats from the publisher and online through book distributors. Her third novel in this series: Murder on Ponte Vecchio was released  June 2020. 

 

In addition to her fiction and two memoirs, Dafoe has written books for educators and pre-service teachers on writing instruction. Her books on writing include Breaking Open the Box: A Guide for Creative Techniques to Improve Academic Writing and Generate Critical Thinking, and a companion book for classroom use, Writing Creatively: A Guided Journal to Using Literary Devices, published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Her latest book on education policy, The Misdirection of Education Policy was published in 2016.

 

Excerpts from Dafoe’s fiction are included in the anthology Lost Orchard, edited by Jo Pitkin and published by SUNY Press in 2014 and in Lost Orchard II, published by Pen Women Press and edited by Isabel Weinger Nielson.

 

Dafoe’s fiction, essays, and poetry have won numerous awards,

including first place in the 2016 William Faulkner/William Wisdom poetry competition, the New Century Writer fiction, and Soul-Making Literary national competitions. Dafoe's chapbook of poetry, Poets Diving in the Night, was a Central New York Book Award Finalist in 2017. 

 

She resides in Homer, New York with her husband Daniel.