Dawn Bratton

Bio

Dawn Bratton is a poet and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area whose work orbits the image of eyes and the theme of perception. Working across poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and video art, she explores how expanding perception and reconciling contradiction can widen our horizons of experience.

Her poems, essays, and video pieces have appeared in Fjords Review, The Opiate, Modern Literature, Matter, Rush Magazine, The Bloom, Oracle, and other literary journals. She has been featured on Georgina Marie Guardado’s Rooted in Poetry podcast alongside Beat poet Clive Matson and in the California Writers Club Berkeley’s Starting Points series. Recent work includes the essay “If I Only Could, I’d Make a Deal With God” in Fjords Review (August 2024) and video poems featured in Rush Magazine and The Bloom.

From 2021–2023, Dawn served as secretary and vice president of WordSwell, a nonprofit literary journal, where she continues as an advisor. In 2023 she co-founded Moon Blossom Collective and managed its literary journal, Lunar Light. In 2025, she founded Karma for Creatives, drawing on her previous experience as a CPA to support creatives in cultivating sustainable creative lives. She has assisted in poetry workshops and brought poetry into high school classrooms to inspire emerging writers.

Currently she is revising Ghost Trap, a contemporary fantasy novel, and developing forms for translating poetry into live immersive readings using voice, sound, and projection to recreate the lived moment from which each poem emerged.