Born in Chicago, Dana Knott (she/her) resides in Delaware, Ohio, and works in Columbus as Director of Libraries at the Columbus State Library. She occasionally teaches a course she designed on storytelling and social justice at Antioch University. Dana holds a MA in English, a MA in Library and Information Science, and a PhD in education for organizational leadership. She wrote the poems contained in Girl, Drowning during the COVID-19 lockdown, a disruptive yet surprisingly creative time when Dana also launched tiny wren lit, which publishes micropoetry online with downloadable zines for each issue. She is a lover of beautiful, tiny things. tiny wren also publishes tiny chapbooks in print and thematic anthologies. She has a sizable collection of various, old editions of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a growing collection of Edward Gorey signed books, first editions, and ephemera. Her work has appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal’s EMBLAZON issue, Bitter Oleander, One Art, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, The York Literary Review, right hand pointing, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ethel Zine, Minerva Rising, Cosmic Daffodil, East Ridge Review, and Moss Puppy Magazine. Her micro chapbook Funeral Flowers was published by Rinky Dink Press in 2024.

The poems in Girl, Drowning were inspired by Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829–1862), a preRaphaelite model, muse, poet, and artist. Much attention rests on Siddal’s fame as the model for John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851–1852), her laudanum addiction, and the exhumation of her corpse years after her death for her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti to retrieve a poetry manuscript he placed in her coffin. The poems within Girl, Drowning intend to amplify Elizabeth’s voice and fill in other details of her life, including her aspirations as a poet and artist and her desire for autonomy.