Who Is Dan?
Dan Flanigan is a novelist, poet, playwright, and practicing lawyer. Born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, he received his Ph.D. from Rice University and J.D. from University of Houston. He taught at the University of Houston and the University of Virginia. His first book was his Ph.D. dissertation, The Criminal Law of Slavery and Freedom, 1800-1868. He moved on from academia to serve the civil rights cause as a school desegregation lawyer, followed by a long career as a finance attorney in private law practice.
Recently, he has been able to turn his attention to his lifelong ambition—creative writing. In 2019 he released a literary trifecta: Mink Eyes, the first in the Peter O’Keefe series (The Big Tilt is the second in the series and was published in October, 2020); his heart-wrenching poetry collection Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death, on the last illness and death of his wife; and Dewdrops, a collection of shorter fiction.
He has also written stage plays including Secrets (based on the life of Eleanor Marx) and Moondog’s Progress (based on the life of Alan Freed). The stage play version of Dewdrops enjoyed a full-cast staged reading at the Theatre of the Open Eye in New York, directed by John Cappellatti who described the play as a “powerful” work about “addiction in America—addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, danger, power, and to finding the Answer,” with characters that are “well drawn, real, and actors love to portray them.“
He has written a feature film screenplay of Mink Eyes and a pilot for a TV series called O’Keefe.
Over the years Dan has committed his time and energy to projects and organizations he is passionate about. He and his wife Candy established Sierra Tucson, a leading international addiction treatment center in Tucson, Arizona. Dan also serves on the Board of Directors of Childhood USA, a national nonprofit organization working to end child sexual abuse and exploitation.
His inspirations include J.S. Bach, Shakespeare, Rumi, Bob Dylan, Secretariat (yes, the horse), Joseph Campbell, Turgenev, Yeats, Joyce, Robert Stone, and E.L. Doctorow.
He divides his time among Kansas City, New York City, and Los Angeles.