Dan Cassenti is a novelist and a strong believer in the idea that storytelling is the best way to reach people and help them understand a message. Dan is interested in conveying the importance of individual rights as a moral approach to life. His debut novel, Charlton’s Ground (Anaphora Literary Press) tells the story of an enslaved boy on a South Carolina plantation who learns how to read and about his inalienable rights. As he grows into a man, Charlton understands that all of his struggles in life come down to the Master’s enslavement of him and repression of his rights. The novel follows his story of unrequited love and the desperate need to seek revenge.
Dan is also writing a trilogy on a dystopian future United States where women’s rights are oppressed in a paternalistic society. In the first novel in the trilogy, Evolution Farm, Evan Quantril struggles with trying to fulfill a promise he made to his mother as a child to fight for women’s rights, but confronts a society that opposes him, including his two brothers. When he rescues a wife from the Farm where girls and women are kept captive until purchased as wives by men, he aims to re-train her to believe in freedom and rights, but is his cause self-defeating? At this moment, the sequel, Devolution Farm is a complete draft and the final novel of the trilogy, Revolution Farm is being written. Stay tuned!
In his non-fiction life, Dan is a cognitive psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Penn State University. Among his 40 non-fiction research publications is the book, The Mental Representation of Goals. His favorite past times are singing and spending time with his wonderful daughter, especially at amusement parks. He lives in Maryland, the home state of his two biggest heroes, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who risked their lives to defend the rights of others. Please check out Dan’s web site at www.dancassenti.com.
