Daniel Rousseau explores trauma, mental illness, and doubt through essays and stories. His work—twice noted in The Best American Essays—has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, The Baltimore Review (nonfiction contest winner), The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Writing (creative nonfiction) from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in Writing Studies from Saint Joseph’s University, where he’s taught rhetoric and composition. He lives with his wife and daughter in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Contact: rousseau.dw@gmail.com
Selected Publications
Stories
Belly of the Beast, The Forge Literary Magazine, July 2026
Erosion Control, The Los Angeles Review, Feb. 2026
Essays
Staring Down the Barrel, The Baltimore Review, Jan. 2022 (contest winner)
Toward the Physics of Trauma, The Florida Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2021
Catch Me, Daddy, The Chattahoochee Review, vol. 29, 2020 (noted in The Best American Essays 2021; finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize and Steinberg Essay Prize)
Reaching First, Columbia Journal, March 2020 (contest runner-up)
Conceptual Metaphors in Baseball, Baseball Research Journal, vol. 48, no. 2, 2019
Grounded, Cimarron Review, triple issue, 2019
Ride, Hippocampus Magazine, Jan. 2018
Retrieving Charlie, The Briar Cliff Review, no. 29, 2017 (contest runner-up; noted in The Best American Essays 2018)
