I write under the name Dakota Orlando (Dakota being my middle name). I live with my wife in eastern Washington State. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, I settled in Tampa, Florida into a teaching career. In 2015, I passed an editor's exam for the Florida Writers Association. I've been a judge for their annual writing contest (which now has grown to nearly 400 entries) since 2008. I now run a small writers' group called The Escape Pod, where we use short story writing to train new authors.

A four-year service in the Navy led me to meet a naval base librarian. She got me involved in small community theatre productions. I took it up in my quest for a bachelor's degree but found out my best endeavor would be in playwriting. I couldn't really act. 

A professional playwright, T. Dianne Anderson, came to my university as a guest professor. I took several playwriting courses from her. I learned a lot of the elements of writing--everything except narrative writing.

When my mother died in 1988, I took all the poetry she'd written and rewrote it so people could understand it. She wrote in a biblical, bastardized version of English that most people found confusing. That hooked me into writing poetry (about 700 poems) Then one day in July 1998, I had a born-again-like epiphany to write a novel. And 3,500,000 words later, not a day goes by when I don't do something in the writing realm (a lot of editing). Recently (in early 2025, I had 23 novels and two short story anthologies up on Amazon's Vella platform. They discontinued it in February 2025, and I became an unpublished author. This year I am releasing the first books of my two series: 1) "Albacron," a post apocalyptic Sci-fi on the order of "The Hunger Games" but without the games. 2) "Yankee Tigress," a Civil War historical women's series about the first female lawyer to pass the bar and practice law-an abolitionist born on the largest plantation in the State of Maryland.

Dakota Orlando