Dana Wall | Stories & Scripts

Before Elizabeth Bennet ever sparred with Darcy, there was a teenage Jane Austen filling notebooks with stories so anarchic, so wickedly funny, so shockingly modern that scholars would later compare them to Beckett and Pinter. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen she wrote twenty-nine works of savage wit and absurdist comedy — and they have never been captured on screen.

Until now.

My original pilot, Jane Austen’s Juvenilia, has been named a Finalist at both the Atlanta Screenwriting Competition and the prestigious Cinequest Film & Screenplay Festival. This is the Jane before the restraint. The comedian before the drawing room. The girl who has been waiting two hundred years for her close-up.

The Red Migration (Story Unlikely), Tangent Online Reading list logo compliments of Story Unlikely Editor, Danny Hanker

Three Ice Cubes – Semifinalist Short Screenplay – BlueCat Screenplay Competition – 40 of 1091 shorts

The Six Loops of Scott & Capital Crimes – Semifinalist Screenplay – Pitch Now Screenplay Competition

The Six Loops of Scott & Juvenilia – Selected Screenplay and Teleplay – Los Angeles Int’l Screenplay Competition

My short screenplays CUT FLOWERS and THREE ICE CUBES both made it to the Quarterfinals of the BlueCat Screenplay Competition—105 selected from 1,097 submissions. Honored to have both stories recognized.

2026 BlueCat Quarterfinalists

Named to Tangent Online’s 2025 Recommended Reading List

https://view.flodesk.com/emails/68434f72c32ff7e30b46cebb

“Milk Teeth” forthcoming in the 10th Anniversary Issue of Ink in Thirds, Spring 2026.

Fagends at the Whitney

A podcast for short but powerful writing.

Micro x Tadpole Press: 100-Word Contest

Dana Wall is a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Manhattan Beach, California.

Her literary work appears in Brevity, Tupelo Quarterly, River Teeth: Beautiful Things, Hunger Mountain, Columbia Journal (contest winner), Strange Horizons, The Maine Review, Necessary Fiction, and SWWIM, among others. She has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination.

Her screenplay The Erasure won at the Global Film Festival Awards, and The Van Cleef Chronicles was a finalist at the Big Apple Film Festival and selected for the Alpine International Film Festival. Additional screenwriting honors include finalist recognition at Cannes World Film Festival for Three Ice Cubes and semi-finalist placements at Santa Barbara International Screenplay Awards and Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Dana holds an MFA from Goddard College, a Psychology degree, MBA, and CPA credentials. She spent fifteen years managing financial operations in Hollywood before transitioning to full-time creative writing in 2022. She co-authors children’s books with her daughter Amber and specializes in high-concept literary adaptations, psychological thrillers, and character-driven drama that explores memory, transformation, and the spaces between realism and the uncanny.

Big Apple Film Festival and Screenwriting Competition – Finalist – The Van Cleef Chronicles https://www.bigapplefilmfestival.com/fall-2025-finalists

Global Film Festival Awards – Best Screenplay Winner – The Erasure https://www.gffawards.com/jul2025

Santa Barbara Int’l Screenplay Awards – TV Pilot – Semi-Finalist – Jane Austen’s Juvenilia https://portal.wherehollywoodhides.com/contests/santa-barbara-international-screenplay-awards-summer-2025

Cannes World Film Festival – Finalist – Three Ice Cubes https://www.world-film-festival.com/en/finalists-june-2025-world-film-festival-in-cannes/

Filmmatic Short Screenplay Awards (Season 10) – Finalist – The Architect

Filmmatic Comedy Screenplay Awards (Season 10) Semi-Finalist – Jane Austen’s Juvenilia https://www.filmmatic.com/comedyseason10

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=55742&preview=1&_ppp=7a97f88458

Strange Horizons kicked off June with an issue including Dana Wall’s “Customer Service Repre­sentative’s Notes on Soul Processing”, a poem that explores an afterlife in which people are judged not by a divinity exactly, but by an algorithm – a computer program that can review a person’s life and give them a score and options for what their actions have earned them in terms of what comes next. It makes Heaven into a kind of help desk, assisting souls as much as the system allows. The piece seems to build up a vision of the afterlife that mirrors what humans have built on Earth, the bureaucracies and limitations surrounding aid, where decisions are rarely transparent and instead reside behind legalese, giving the illusion of choice without feeling freeing. It’s a fascinating poem.

Thank you Vanessa Jae, poetry editor for Strange Horizons for letting me know.