Dawn McIntyre is a New Jersey native and long-time resident of rural Pennsylvania. After years of remodeling houses and working in corporate America, she began devoting more time to her true passion: building with words. The result, so far, has been a portfolio of short stories and four novels. Among them are Julia's World, a story about a young girl struggling to emerge from the shadow of an abusive mother to discover the rest of the world and her place in it; Distant Relations, about a teen who escapes her stifling extended family to start fresh in the home of her estranged father--a man who realizes too late how much he wants the daughter he left behind; and The Study, in which a thirty-something journalist discovers the illicit secrets of a historic figure he's researching and must face a decision to reveal and profit from them, or to conceal and protect the reputations of long-dead people he's come to admire and respect. Dead Inside, the story of a middle-aged woman who impulsively reaches out to offer comfort to a guilt-ridden stranger and finds that her good deed has only dredged up misery from her own past follows Nala's Dress, a quirky tale of a young couple threatened by a hex visited upon them by a jealous ex-lover. The Festival, a twice-told yarn about a literary grave robber planning to plagiarize a story entrusted to her by an adoring fan was written in response to a prompt suggested by a friend, as was the all-dialogue historical heart-to-heart between a young gay man and his mischievous aunt, The Visit. Her first book, Chance Hill, brought to life an ornery, twentysomething woman, viewed during the summer that changed her life, and her first published novel, Zookeeper, addressed the prevalence, stupidity, and tenacity of prejudice. She founded, along with two fellow authors, a writers' workshop in 2013 that met at a local library until the Covid pandemic necessitated a switch to virtual gatherings. She continues to write fiction peopled by richly nuanced characters in deceptively simple, familiar settings.