Dao Strom was born in Saigon and grew up in northern California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and has been the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, a James Michener fellowship and the Chicago Tribune/Nelson Algren Award. Her first novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof, was published in 2003. The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2006) is her second book of fiction.

Dao currently lives in Juneau, Alaska. She is also a writer of songs.

Praise for The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys:

“With precise, lyrical language, Dao Strom takes on motherhood, music, and lust. After spending afternoons with the four women in The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, I see the world around me differently: every quiet passerby full of yearning, each gesture important and strange.”
- Amanda Eyre Ward, author of How To Be Lost


“There is an underlying emotional current running through these stories that pulls you into a world populated by strong, wise, and displaced women. Dao Strom has a rare talent--the ability to capture feelings and thoughts you don't think can be described, and convey them in elegant prose.”
- Vendela Vida, author of And Now You Can Go

An excerpt from The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys :

Almost always in her mind’s eye she sees him standing still, or she sees him about to move, or moving slowly. He had always seemed remarkably still and slow but deliberate--economical. As if this economy of movement signaled that he was saving up for some larger, grander endeavor sometime in his future. The way his eyes shifted to meet hers that first time in the dorm hallway has played back over and over in her mind's eye. She sees him standing at the end of sidewalks in spots on campus, waiting, looking remotely in her direction. She sees him walking over the rise of a hill in a memory that is not a memory of anything she actually witnessed. When she looks into campfires now she feels a looming sadness, at the back of which something like the ghost of her knowledge of him still walks about. Another vision involves looking at the moon with him somewhere quiet, desertlike, and surreal: a dark blue night, a luminous white earth, a place they have never in this life gone to. The thought of ever meeting him again (of being able to live a life actually loving him) involves, inexplicably, a vision of lying curled together on a hillside, like sleeping goats, refusing to ever get up or go back into town.
    What is this town? What does the hillside mean? There is still no explaining it for her. Time, she thinks, is unrelenting.


The Gentle Order of Girls & Boys by Dao Strom - available for purchase on amazon.com