Dana Combs Leigh writes fiction and nonfiction, often pushing the boundaries of form. Her work examines identity, temporality, and the very nature of experience, reality, and being. Searching for the unique and peculiar in the everyday, she confronts the human condition directly and unapologetically, but with subtlety and care.

 

Having recently completed her doctorate at the University of Portsmouth with her thesis, 'The Borders of Her Body: Subjectivity, Structure, and the Real in Narratives of Chronic Illness', Dana's research delves deep into her own lived experience and creative practice while maintaining a critical approach. Her work is informed by her 'illness studies' framework, and draws from a range of interdisciplinary theory and methodology, including disability and literary studies, philosophy of medicine, phenomenology, health psychology, autoethnography, and more.

 

Dana's fiction has appeared in The London Magazine, and her chapter, 'The Metanarrative of Sarcoidosis: Life in Liminality', was published in David Bolt's Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order in 2021 by Routledge. She is a Sessional Teaching Fellow and presents at various conferences, such as the 2023 Congress for the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research.

 

After spending her childhood in a tiny town in Upstate New York, Dana moved overseas, spending time in London, the Channel Islands, and New Zealand. Her other interests include food, metalsmithing, and prehistory. She is now settled on the southern coast of England with her family.

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