Daren Dean was born in Missouri. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His work has appeared in such places as Fiction Southeast, Image, Chattahoochee, Poetry Southeast, and Story South. He has taught writing and literature at colleges in North Carolina and central Missouri. He has worked in marketing and acquisitions at the University of Missouri Press. Dean is the founding editor of Cedars. He lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife and their two children.
