Dana Czapnik is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she was awarded an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. Czapnik earned her MFA at Hunter College where she was recognized with a Hertog Fellowship. She’s spent most of her career on the editorial side of professional sports including stints at ESPN the Magazine, the United States Tennis Association and the Arena Football League. Her debut novel, The Falconer, will be published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in January of 2019. A native New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan with her husband and son.From Czapnik's Q&A at Goodreads:
GR: What sparked the idea for The Falconer?--Marshal Zeringue
DC: Several years ago Toni Morrison tweeted, “If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” That’s basically the story with The Falconer. I’ve spent my whole life looking for Lucy in fiction and never found her, so I just decided to write her myself.
I’ve always wanted to read a first-person narration and character study of a young woman in New York, wondering and thinking and observing. I’ve read so many wonderful novels with young men doing that, I really craved a female character who felt similarly universal and also microscopically specific.
GR: Did you find yourself influenced by any particular books or authors as you worked on your debut?
DC: Of course the most obvious one is J.D. Salinger. Lucy Adler would never exist without the Glass family or Holden Caulfield, who was the first friend I met...[read on]