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Dawn Turner

Biography

Dawn Turner

Dawn Turner is an award-winning journalist and novelist. A former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. 

Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, "PBS NewsHour," "CBS Sunday Morning News" show, NPR’s "Morning Edition" show, the "Chicago Tonight" show and elsewhere. She has covered national presidential conventions, as well as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election and inauguration.

Turner has been a regular commentator for several national and international news programs, and has reported from around the world in countries such as Australia, China, France and Ghana. She spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

Turner is the author of two novels, ONLY TWICE I'VE WISHED FOR HEAVEN and AN EIGHTH OF AUGUST. In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dawn Turner

Books by Dawn Turner

Majestic Hills
by Dawn Turner - Fiction

Tired of the daily drama in his emergency room, Dr. Langdon Blaque is in search of a place where he can leave the world behind. He loves his job, but he wants peace and quiet. His wife Josephine, a lawyer, prefers the city. Still, she agrees to move with the caveat that they stay for a year and reassess. The tight-knit, predominantly white group of neighbors in Majestic Hills initially welcomes them with open arms. But beneath the veneer of privileged harmony, tensions simmer. When a horrifying crime rocks the community, the illusion of safety is shattered, and Josephine and Langdon find themselves at the heart of a brewing storm that pits neighbor against neighbor. As their experiment in suburban living ticks toward the one-year mark, the Blaques are pushed to a breaking point. Can they find a way to make a home in Majestic Hills?

Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood
by Dawn Turner - Memoir, Nonfiction

Siblings Dawn and Kim, and their best friend Debra, were three Black girls who bonded as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, and for a brief, wondrous moment, they are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” But then fate intervenes, sending them careening in wildly different directions. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why?