Dayna Bateman is a recovering tech worker (MSc, HCI) and an emerging writer. Her work has appeared in trade publications like Internet Retailing and literary journals like the Pacifica and American Literary Review.
In 2025 I received the American Literary Review Award in Essays for Deracination, Or How to Disappear, which interrogates the decision of my Indigenous Sámi ancestors to pass for White in the racial climate of 1880s America. I am a 2023 Storyknife Fellow and an alum of the Tin House, Kenyon Review, and Granta Memoir Workshops.
Current project
I am currently seeking representation for Hustling Vinyl: A Family History of the Record Business and How We Survived the Hype, a memoir + narrative nonfiction account of growing up on the spinning edge of the vinyl record business during the golden age of rock music. This project has received the generous support of PEN/America, which awarded it a 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Literary Oral History Grant, and The Bridport Prize, which named the manuscript the Runner Up of their annual memoir competition. I am forever grateful to Storyknife Writers Retreat for hosting me as a resident in Homer, Alaska, where the book had an opportunity to take shape.
Connect / Stay in Touch
It has been said that reading is inhaling and writing is exhaling. Here’s what I’m reading now or just put down.
