His first novel, Heaven Lake won the 2005 Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters[1] and the 2004 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in Fiction.
[2] Dalton grew up near St. Louis, Missouri, as the youngest of seven children.
[3] He lived for a time in Douliou City, Taiwan (the setting for his first novel)[4] during the late 1980s and travelled extensively in mainland China and Asia.
[5] He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1990s[5] but has now returned to St. Louis where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
[3] He is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri–St.