Fresh Picked Prose: Dyan Neary “The Trash Pickers”

Dyan Neary is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker from New York City. Her feature stories and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Elle, The New York Times, GO, In These Times, The Southeast Review, ZMag, The Independent, and elsewhere, with a focus on human rights, public health, and criminal justice issues. She was the 2017 winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition and the Lillian Smith Writer-in-Service Award, as well as grants from Type Investigations for her reporting. Dyan is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University, and has taught writing composition there and at a Florida women’s prison in since 2013. She is currently writing a creative nonfiction book about the rise of the American prison, for which she was awarded the Adam Johnson Fellowship by FSU and the PEO International Scholar Award in April 2019.