My Story

Al Dawson spent decades inside the institutions his fiction examines.

He entered Saint Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara as a teenager, hoping to become a Franciscan priest. He left. He became a varsity gymnast at the University of New Mexico. He earned a law degree from New York Law School and spent his career as a regulatory lawyer, representing insurance clients before government agencies and lobbying on behalf of major financial institutions in Washington, DC. After September 11, he volunteered as a bilingual Red Cross worker in New York City.

He understands, from the inside, how institutions work. And how they fail the people who trusted them.

That knowledge is the foundation of his fiction. Searching for Noriko (2021), a story of guilt, forgiveness, and promises made in wartime, earned second place in the new novel category at the Palm Beach Book Festival. Priest (2024), a moral thriller about institutional corruption within the Catholic Church, was awarded Gold, First Place for Adult Fiction in the 2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Borderlines (2026), a political thriller about a federal prosecutor whose crusade against a Mexican drug cartel becomes personal, continues the moral universe he has been building since his first novel.

His protagonists are not rebels. They are insiders: a veteran, a lawyer, a prosecutor. People who discover that the systems they devoted their lives to are capable of a betrayal they did not see coming. They come through. Scarred, but successfully. Al Dawson has always preferred positive endings.

He lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida with his wife Jane. He publishes under Luna del Lobo Books.