Will Dowd is a writer and artist based outside Boston. His work—essays, poems, dream-grown fiction, and editorial cartoons—circles a single subject: how we see, and what we make when the body fails us.

 His debut essay collection, Areas of Fog, was named a Massachusetts Book Awards Nonfiction "Must Read." He is a regular editorial cartoonist for The Boston Globe, where his series remembers artists who turned illness, loss, and obscurity into beauty.

When reading became one of many things his vision disorder stole, he went looking for another way into books: with a Creative Grant from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room and an experimental dream-incubation device from the MIT Media Lab, he spent a year directing his own dreams. The result is The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires, a collection of twenty dream-inflected stories, coming October 2026.

On the night of every full moon he publishes The Lunar Dispatch, a free newsletter about our nearest celestial neighbor, read by over 5,000 subscribers in more than 100 countries and featured by Substack Reads four years running.

His writing and artwork have appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, Writer's Digest, LitHub, The Boston Globe Magazine,and Poets & Writers. His honors include the Rumi Prize for Poetry from Arts & Letters, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a James Merrill House residency, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Artist Award, the Key West Literary Seminar Scotti Merrill Scholarship (selected by Paul Muldoon), and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award. He currently serves as a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine. He holds degrees from Boston College, NYU, and MIT.