In addition to the novel Rancho de Amor (West Margin Press/Turner Publishing 2020), I’ve written a few other things.  My theatrical work has been performed in twelve different theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area, another dozen in other States, and in a few theaters internationally. These venues have ranged from the enormous Paramount Theater to the intimate black box at Theater Artaud, from Gallery Players in Oregon to the Abingdon Theater in NYC, from the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh to the Litteraturhuset in Oslo. I received a San Francisco Bay Area Playwrights Award, and my play, A Killer Story, was awarded numerous grants including a discretionary James T. Irvine Grant and a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve published close to a hundred different poems in print and online publications and three books of poetry. I’ve also published two photo-essay books and two children’s books, one of which received the Children’s Choice Award from the International Reading Association and, when put to music, won a London Times Critics Choice award when performed by Kent Nagano and the Halle Symphony. I conceived of the “zipper” poetic form and wrote the libretto for the soaPOPera Zipperz with composer Nathaniel Stookey. It premiered at the Paramount Theater in Oakland (2008) and was released on CD on the Warner/Ghostlight label (2017). In 2019, I received a commission from the Oakland Symphony and West Edge Opera to write the libretto for a dramatic oratorio, Here I Stand, about Paul Robeson that will be performed first by the Oakland East Bay Symphony then by the National Symphony and Chorus at the Kennedy Center in 2024.  

Over two-dozen of my articles and features have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (recently a collection of five poems about homelessness), other newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. A few of my commentaries have aired on National Public Radio as well as other radio programs. Over 50 published reviews of various works are available, many online. I am currently working on a new novel, a book of poems, and an opera with composer Paul Dresher.

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My varied past includes working as a cowboy in Central California; as a grunt pulling green-chain and driving truck for an Oregon lumber-mill; as a translator, director of a sailing school, ski-instructor, and waiter in France where I lived for three years; and in San Francisco as co-owner of a successful restaurant/catering business and teacher of English and philosophy (TOK) at the French American International School in San Francisco. A native of L.A. and a graduate of U. C. Berkeley, I live with my wife, Ora Schulman, in San Francisco.

(See Wikipedia – “Dan Harder Writer” for more details.)