Dan Keane

Dan is writing a series of nonfiction essays that explore the authority of the expat voice in online spaces.

Commenced 2023

Dan Keane is an American writer and teacher living in the Wairarapa. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Harper's, McSweeney's, Zoetrope: All-Story, ChinaFile, The Austin Chronicle, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and he is a former Bolivia correspondent for The Associated Press. He has taught writing at NYU Shanghai and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Michigan. He likes to write letters home.

Dan writes: 'I'm interested in the expat writer’s performance of authority. Drawing from studies of nationalism, post-Cold War cosmopolitanism, and current theories of extraterritorial literature, and reading selected fiction, memoir, and online writing, I will examine how the expat writer balances the controlled detachment of the correspondent with the humbling study of the immigrant. How does this balance change on the internet, where voice replaces geography as the chief markers of national identity? What can the expat explain, and to whom?

Read his essays online at NZ American.