As a core member of the creative writing faculty, Professor Dutton teaches graduate and undergraduate fiction writing workshops as well as a variety of creative-critical courses that emphasize cross-genre and interdisciplinary approaches.
Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL. Her first book was the hybrid prose collection Attempts at a Life. She also wrote the text interpolations in Richard Kraft’s collage narrative Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera and the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive. Her next book, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
In 2009, Dutton co-founded the acclaimed feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. The press was named for Dutton’s great aunt Dorothy Traver, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the backroads of Southern California, delivering books to rural desert communities. Over the past decade, Dorothy (which Dutton runs with her husband, Martin Riker) has published an eclectic array of titles that have gone on to receive national attention, from Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's Whiting Award-winning novel Fra Keeler to The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington and Renee Gladman's Ravickian series. The press offers internships to Washington University students.
Dutton holds a PhD from the University of Denver, an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Before joining the faculty at Wash U in 2011, she was the book designer at Dalkey Archive Press and an instructor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.