Called by the Chicago Tribune "one of America's most prolific and
versatile writers... an earthy, yarn-spinning woman," Crescent Dragonwagon is the author of 59 traditionally published books in multiple genres --- novels, cookbook-memoirs, poetry, children’s books, biography.

She likes to say that she’s lucky she’s a writer, otherwise people would categorize her as a dilettante or flake… since she is interested in, and has pursued professionally, so many different topics.

"But because I write," she says, "I have had, and still have, a lifetime of being able to dive deeply into whatever my obsession of the moment is, and ending up becoming an expert or near-expert in an idiosyncratic collection of topics."

Born in New York to two writers, biographer Maurice Zolotow and children's book writer and editor Charlotte Zolotow, Dragonwagon improbably moved to the Arkansas Ozarks when she was 18.

Initially a "hipbilly," a loose part of the back-to-the-land movement of the early 1970's, she fell in love with much about the state, and has lived there most of her adult life (though always sprinkling in travel as she could).

From 1972 to 2000, she resided in the small, hip boho resort town of Eureka Springs, built in the Victorian era.

Dragonwagon, a fine cook, who sometimes calls herself a Southern Yankee as well as a recovering restaurateur, spent 18 of the Eureka years as innkeeper/chef/ and co-owner of Dairy Hollow House, an acclaimed, award-winning country inn  and restaurant, which she co-owned with her late husband, Ned Shank, an historic preservationist, artist, and writer. Her cookbook-memoir Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread, A Country Inn Cookbook, was nominated for both an IACP and a James Beard Award and has sold nearly a million copies.
After Dragonwagon and Shank closed the inn, they co-founded The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, a non-profit 501 (c) 3 organization. It continues to thrive, having served more than 10,000 writers from over 48 states and a dozen countries since its inception.

After being suddenly widowed in 2000, at age 46 (Ned, an ardent bicyclist, she says, "went out for his typical 3 times a week ride, but instead of coming home, he bicycled into eternity,"), Dragonwagon moved away from the state for about a decade, returning to the East Coast to assist in caregiving for her mother and aunt, while she also grieved and attempted to recover from Ned's abrupt death.

But eventually, a few years after her mother's death, she came back home to Arkansas.

Dragonwagon knows the whole state pretty well, thanks to her early years traveling as part of the then-vibrant Artists-in-Schools program. Through A.I.S., she did creative writing with the state’s children and adolescents. She traveled throughout the state, a young visiting writer working with students everywhere from the famous Central High in Little Rock to elementary and high schools and universities throughout the state: Fox, DeQueen, Dumas, Crossett. She worked with the children of share-croppers in the Delta, troubled kids in the state’s two reform schools (in Pine Bluff, and Alexander), and many others subsets or young people.

"It shaped me," she says. "Gave me experiences I could never have had had I stayed in the intellectual, literary milieu into which I was born. I am grateful for both, grateful to be bi-rooted."

Her A.I.S. work shaped others, too; for instance, a fourth-grader she taught in Prairie Grove, Stacy Pershall, grew up to write a memoir, Loud in the House of Myself, in which she detailed her Southern Baptist upbringing in a graceful, harrowing narrative spanning her life from age eight to thirty-five.

Meanwhile, many of Dragonwagon’s own books were winning awards; among them, Half a Moon and One Whole Star , illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (a Coretta Scott King Award), The Year It Rained (a New York Times Notable), and Passionate Vegetarian (a James Beard Award).
Her Bean by Bean was the topic of an in-depth interview on NPR.

In addition, she's written for publications ranging from the New York Times Book Review to Cosmopolitan, MS, and the North American Review. Her most recent children’s book, the reissued Will It Be Okay?, was featured on NPR.

She is the creator of "Until Just Moistened: A Not-Quite One-Woman Show, with Crumbs,"  a play in which she performed with musician Bill Haymes as part of TheatreSquared’s 2018 New Play Festival. She has appeared on Good Morning America and Today, Food Network, TVFN, and CNN.  NPR listeners know her from Tom Ashbrook's On Point, Lynne Rosetto Kasper's The Splendid Table, and Micheal Feldman's Whaddya Know.

She blogs at Substack from several perspectives:

• her Nothing is Wasted on the Writer posts explore the integration and how-to of life-experience and artistic work
• her Deep Feast essays are about “writing the world through food”: recipes, entertaining, gardening, connection
• her I Know Why the Aged Bird Sings posts explore aging wisely and well, grief, and reinvention.
• her Famous People Who Have Known Me posts follow her adventures with many of the well-known individuals in her life, some famous, some infamous, and some eccentric, including Stevie Wonder, Julia Child, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Betty Friedan, Taj Mahal, and the late groupie Sweet, Sweet Connie.

An active, resilient, still-working woman in her 70’s,  Dragonwagon is the developer and teacher of Fearless Writing™, the crown jewel of several writing workshops she has taught all over the  world. Graduates include the late aforementioned Julia Child, children’s book writer Monica Clark Robinson (also a Coretta Scott King Award-winner) and regional novelist Talya Tate Boerner. Dragonwagon has given talks, some of them keynotes, at conferences and conventions, including the American Library Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the International Reading Association, the International Associations of Culinary Professionals, Professional Association of Innkeepers International, and the Young Presidents Association. She performed at the 250th celebration of America's birthday at the Arkansas Folklife Festival: A massive three-day celebration of the state's culture, craft traditions, and live music, with "Almost Everything I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Cornbread."

She also serves as literary executor to her late mother, Charlotte Zolotow. She works to organize and preserve the Zolotow archives and has shepherded reissues of several of her mother's books, including A Rose, A Bridge, and a Wild Black Horse  and A Tiger Called Tomas.

Dragonwagon also has the distinction of having prepared beans and cornbread for a U.S. President (Bill Clinton), titled royalty (Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia), a world-renowned feminist (Betty Friedan) and Marilyn Monroe's first biographer (Maurice Zolotow... her late father).

"I'm the first to admit, it's been a goofyass wild ride of a life," she says. "It still is."

When she returned to Arkansas, although she still visits Eureka Springs frequently, she chose to live in the in Fayetteville, a vibrant university town where she lives, writes, and cooks in a 1908 home in the Washington-Willow historic district.

She shares that home, and indeed her life, with her husband Mark Graff, a cyber-defender. Both are social justice and community activists, theatre-goers, and passionate readers and discussers.

She is continually surprised to find herself happily married again, in a late-life romance.

She believes that secret of much is to just get up one more time than you fall or at pushed down. Over and over again.

And yes, it's her real name.