Dana Schwartz Books in Order

Dana Schwartz grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, in a Jewish family that cared about books, reading, and school. She has said one of her happiest childhood memories was going to writing camp, but when she arrived at Brown University, she still thought the sensible plan was medicine, not publishing.

At Brown, she studied public policy and spent time on a pre-med track, which helps explain why science keeps showing up in her fiction. But writing kept tugging at her. While she was still in college, she created the parody account @GuyInYourMFA, later followed by @DystopianYA, and suddenly her jokes about literary pretension and YA tropes were reaching far beyond campus.

That was the opening.

The internet attention did not lock her into one format. It gave her room to try several. Schwartz built a career in journalism and criticism, writing for magazines and newspapers while also moving into books, podcasting, and television. That willingness to jump between forms has become one of the clearest things about her work. She does not seem especially interested in staying in a single lane if another idea looks more fun.

Her first novel, And We're Off, is a contemporary YA story about Nora Holmes, a teenage artist on a European trip that is supposed to help her grow, until her mother unexpectedly comes along. Readers who like it usually point to the quick banter, the travel energy, and the believable mix of irritation and love in the mother-daughter relationship. Choose Your Own Disaster takes a different route, using the shape of a personality quiz to revisit the messy choices and bad ideas of early adulthood.

She can be very funny without pretending life is neat.

That same comic edge drives The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon, which expands her GuyInYourMFA voice into a full satirical send-up of literary gatekeeping. Then came the books that introduced many new readers to her, Anatomy and Immortality. Those novels turn toward gothic YA, following Hazel Sinnett, a young woman who wants to be a surgeon in a world that would rather see her married off. Set amid grave robbers, plague scares, secret societies, and court intrigue, the books mix romance with medical curiosity and a lot of delight in the creepy side of history.

That interest in history is not just a side hobby. Schwartz is also the creator and host of Noble Blood, a podcast about royals, power, and the disasters that sit behind official legends. If you look across her bibliography, the connecting threads become pretty clear: she likes ambition, power, women pushing against the rules, and the strange overlap between public image and private fear. Even when the tone changes, her characters tend to be smart, restless people trying to claim authority in places that were not built for them.

She also writes for television and film, which fits her knack for pace and dialogue. Whether she is writing about a teenage painter, a woman sneaking into anatomy lessons, or Deadpool getting dragged into another impossible mess, there is usually a feeling of motion, wit, and curiosity pushing the story forward.

Now she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their cats, Eddie and Beetlejuice. It is a pretty good home base for a writer whose work has room for literary jokes, superhero chaos, dark royal history, and nineteenth-century surgery.