age, as his father had a collection of science fiction books which lined the walls of Dann's bedroom and he recalls "gazing at the colorful covers before I could read." In the late 1960s, he encountered a number of now well-known writers and editors in the science fiction and fantasy field, including George Zebrowski, Pamela Sargent, Gardner Dozois, Jack Haldeman and Joe Haldeman, two of whom, Zebrowski and Sargent, also lived in Binghamton and were students with Dann at Binghamton University (then known as SUNY Binghamton). Dann was soon collaborating with Zebrowski, "sitting on opposite sides of a table in his dining room and writing on an old manual typewriter" and in 1970 sold two of these collaborations, "Dark, Dark the Dead Star" and "Traps," to the magazine Worlds of If, with 'Traps' being Dann's first published work when it appeared in March 1970. Dann had previously sold a story to Damon Knight for Orbit, but this took almost two years to be published. Zebrowski also introduced Dann to the world of science fiction conventions and fandom, a culture he has been involved in ever since. Initially he combined continued sales of his stories with work as a door-to-door salesman, which began after a commission for his first novel, Starhiker, was not finalized by his prospective publisher and he had become indebted, expecting payment for the piece. While continuing his writing, he moved on from sales to commence a business career, starting companies in the advertising, cable and insurance industries, among others and later working as a business consultant. He also taught writing at Cornell University in 1973. He published his first book as editor, Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1974, and his first novel, Starhiker, in 1977. Move to Australia In 1994 he moved to Melbourne to join Janeen Webb, a Melbourne science fiction critic, academic, and writer, whom he met at a conference in San Francisco and married in 1995. It was the second marriage for each of them. He has since collaborated with Webb on several writing and editing projects and the couple are well known in Australian speculative fiction culture. He currently lives on a farm overlooking the sea near Foster, in the Gippsland region of Victoria, but also typically spends some period of each year in Los Angeles and New York. In 2016 he received a Ph.D. from the