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THE TASTE OF RAIN IN BUENOS AIRES — Stories
Etruscan Press • October 2026 • 132 pages • 5.5 × 8.5 • $18 • ISBN 9798990767881
Advanced Praise
"Will Dowd writes beautifully. These stories are whimsical, sometimes comic, and wonderfully creative." —Alan Lightman,” author Einstein’s Dreams
"An original work whose sensuality and wildness compels rereading. A radiant success." — Stuart Dybek
“Lovely, strange, hilarious stories, born of a writer's ingenious attempt to dream his way back to the garden. Not just a fascinating experiment, but a triumph." — Ben Loory
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Selected Press & Recognition
The Dream Makers — BBC World Service
A documentary on the emerging field of dream engineering, featuring Will's Dormio experiment.
The 2025 Rumi Prize for Poetry — Arts & Letters
Selected by judge James Kimbrell. Four poems appear in Issue 49.
"Does Dream Inception Work?" — Nautilus Magazine
A Q&A about a yearlong dream project as the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room experiment concluded.
WPR Creative Grant — Harvard University, 2022–2023
Awarded by the Woodberry Poetry Room to fund DREAMFALL, an experiment in directed dreaming using the MIT Media Lab's Dormio device.
"What To Read: Will Dowd is ruminating on the moon"
A featured interview about The Lunar Dispatch, named a Substack Featured Publication four years running.
“Writing in the Dark” —NEA Big Reads talk: A Virtual Writing Workshop 2023
On Substack's rise — San Francisco Chronicle
The Lunar Dispatch featured in a report on the future of online writing.
"Contemplating a Vermeer or a Rainstorm, Will Dowd Sees Things Differently" — MIT Slice
A profile on Vermeer Through a New Lens, exhibited at MIT's Rotch Library.
Finding My New Voice — NPR's Morning Edition / WBUR Cognoscenti, May 2019
A radio essay on writing with a vision disorder.
Massachusetts Book Award — 2018
Areas of Fog named a Nonfiction "Must Read" by the 18th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards.
“Capturing The Poetic Beauty Of New England Weather” —WBUR’s Radio Boston. An interview about Areas of Fog with Meghna Chakrabarti.
Short Bio
Will Dowd is a writer and artist based outside Boston. His debut book, Areas of Fog, was named a Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read." He is an editorial cartoonist for The Boston Globe, a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine, and author of the newsletter The Lunar Dispatch.
Long Bio
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.