About
D. A. Dorwart is an award-winning writer and director whose work has been seen on and Off-Broadway, in regional theater and opera, and on television. Writings include adaptations, translations, and original work for stage, film and print. A recipient of the Julie Harris Playwriting Award, four John Golden Awards in Directing, and a TCG/PEW grant for Arena Stage and The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., Dorwart’s collaborations have included premieres with playwrights Robert Anderson, Lee Blessing, Marsha Norman, Alan Brown, David Mamet, A. R. Gurney, and Nick Dear and work with such actors as Richard Chamberlain, Susan Sarandon, William Hurt, Greg German, Jerry Orbach, Blythe Danner, Judge Reinhold, Liev Schreiber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Eric Stolz, among many others. Dorwart received a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and a Master’s of Fine Arts from Smith College and conducted post-grad studies in film at NYU and Shakespeare at the University of Birmingham, the Shakespeare Institute and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Dorwart has been a guest artist/professor at Radcliffe-Harvard, M.I.T., Suffolk University, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Rutgers, NYU and Juilliard. Dorwart's first novel "The Sorrows of Gathering" is due out in 2025.
Featured Work
"The Sorrows of Gathering"
In the picturesque college town of Marshford, Massachusetts a young man named Mathew McKinnon has gone missing and is presumed dead.
The year is 1983, three years into the Reagan Presidency and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
The architect Nolan Gathering, with whom the young man was apprenticed, is arrested and charged with first-degree felony murder. The District Attorney seeks the death penalty, which has been recently re-instated in the Commonwealth, because the murder was allegedly committed during the sexual assault of the young man.
The accused enlists the aid of his childhood sweetheart Rebecca Quinn Martin, a nationally renowned criminal defense attorney.
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The Sorrows of Gathering combines the intrigue of a murder mystery and the excitement of a courtroom drama with the eloquence and sensibility of literary fiction. Like To Kill A Mockingbird and Snow Falling On Cedars, the novel weaves a complex and compelling story around a central character accused of murder and wrestles with prejudices that pervert public attitudes and our legal system as well as devastate personal lives. Over multiple generations, the novel’s themes of love and valor, sexuality and sacrifice, time and loss, betrayal and redemption make it a work of serious literary fiction.
“Its richness,” says prize-winning author Mark Spencer, “reminds me of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.”
(www.dadorwart.com)
