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. After a teaching stint at UVA, he returned home to work on the original Kansas City School Desegregation case. Later, he entered private practice, became a name partner at Polsinelli, created and chaired its Real Estate & Financial Services Department for two decades, and established their NYC office where he remains managing partner. See his legal bio at https://www.polsinelli.com/professionals/dflanigan. Taking a break from law from 1983 to 1985, he and his wife, Candy, founded Sierra Tucson, a prominent drug treatment center located in Tucson, Arizona.
Dan’s recently published novel, Mink Eyes, is set in 1986 in a place very much like Kansas City and the Missouri Ozarks. Dan intends to bring this group of characters from the 1980’s through the present day. He has developed screenplay version of Mink Eyes as well as pilot for a TV series called O’Keefe.
Dan’s other publications include Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death, a poetry collection dealing with the illness and death of his wife, and Dewdrops, a collection of short fiction. He has also written several plays: Secrets (based on Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, a social and political force in her own right in late Victorian England); Moondog’s Progress (based on Alan Freed, the disc jockey who “discovered” and was the major original promoter of rock n roll);and Dewdrops, a tragedy set in a drug and alcohol treatment center (this received a staged reading at the Theatre of the Open Eye in New York).
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.
