
Dan Simmons grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in 1991's SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002's A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art. Dan received his Masters in Education from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971. He then worked in elementary education for 18 years—2 years in Missouri, 2 years in Buffalo, New York—one year as a specially trained BOCES "resource teacher" and another as a sixth-grade teacher—and 14 years in Colorado. ABOUT DAN Biographic Sketch His last four years in teaching were spent creating, coordinating, and teaching in APEX, an extensive gifted/talented program serving 19 elementary schools and some 15,000 potential students. During his years of teaching, he won awards from the Colorado Education Association and was a finalist for the Colorado Teacher of the Year. He also worked as a national language-arts consultant, sharing his own "Writing Well" curriculum which he had created for his own classroom. Eleven and twelve-year-old students in Simmons' regular 6th-grade class averaged junior-year in high school writing ability according to annual standardized and holistic writing assessments. Whenever someone says "writing can't be taught," Dan begs to differ and has the track record to prove it. Since becoming a full-time writer, Dan likes to visit college writing classes, has taught in New Hampshire's Odyssey writing program for adults, and is considering hosting his own Windwalker Writers' Workshop. Dan's first published story appeared on Feb. 15, 1982, the day his daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born. He's always attributed that coincidence to "helping in keeping things in perspective when it comes to the relative importance of writing and life." Dan has been a full-time writer since 1987 and lives along the Front Range of Colorado—in the same town where he taught for 14 years—with his wife, Karen, his daughter, Jane, (when she's home from Hamilton College) and their Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Fergie. He does much of his writing at Windwalker—their mountain property and cabin at 8,400 feet of altitude at the base of the Continental Divide, just south of Rocky Mountain National Park. An 8-ft.-tall sculpture of the Shrike—a thorned and frightening character from the four Hyperion/Endymion novels—was sculpted by an ex-student and friend, Clee Richeson, and the sculpture now stands guard near the isolated cabin.
Series
Books

Children of the Night
1992

The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz
2012

Phases Of Gravity
1989

Fires of Eden
1994

Song of Kali
1985

L'Échiquier du mal
1992

A Winter Haunting
2002

Black Hills
2010

Hyperion / The Fall of Hyperion / Endymion / Rise of Endymion
2013

Endymion
1996

The Terror
2007

Death in Bangkok
1993

The Fifth Heart
2015

This Year's Class Picture
1992

Hard as Nails
2003

Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds
1988

The Crook Factory
1999

Drood
2009

Darwin's Blade
2000

Hardcase
2001

Ilium
2003

The Fall of Hyperion
1990

The Hyperion Omnibus
1990

Strvinarska uteha, Središnjica
2007

Hypérion 1
1970

Prayers to Broken Stones
1990

Hyperion
1989

The Hollow Man
1992

Carrion Comfort
1989

Blood Is Not Enough
17 Stories of Vampirism
1989

Endymion
I canti di Hyperion - Libro due di due
1996

Summer Sketches
1992

Orphans of the Helix
1999

Worlds Enough & Time
Five Tales of Speculative Fiction
2002

Summer of Night
1991

Olympos
2005

Strvinarska uteha, Završnica
2007

Flashback
2011

Muse of Fire
2008

Hard Freeze
2002

The Rise of Endymion
1997

The Abominable
2013

Elm Haven
2019

The Living Dead
2008