Dan Conover grew up in and around Greensboro, N.C., joined the Army, went to college on the G.I. Bill, earned his degree from the University of North Carolina in 1990, and worked for The Daily Tar Heel, The Chapel Hill Newspaper, The (Waynesville, N.C.) Mountaineer and The Shelby Star. He joined the staff at The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier in 1994.
Over the next 14 years he worked as a reporter, ran the newspaper’s remote bureaus and political coverage, edited the Sunday edition, worked as an assistant features editor, launched the paper’s blogging, social media, podcasting and multimedia efforts, directed its website, and spent almost seven years as City Editor. His Sunday editions won the paper the South Carolina Press Association’s General Excellence award in 1996, and the Association named him its Journalist of the Year in 2005.
He left the paper on a buyout in 2008 and after working as a freelancer and media consultant for several years, launched a media services company — Xarktopia LLC — with his wife, Janet Edens.
Between contracts and freelance assignments, Dan wrote four novels — A Madness (2008), Siobeth (2009), Bokur (2011) and Another Goddamn Novel About the Collapsing Quantum Multiverse (2012). He founded the soccer news site CHS Soccer in 2013, and spent two years as the full-time marketing and communications director for the Charleston Battery professional soccer club (2014-16). The club, founded in 1983, set its all-time attendance record in 2015.
In the fall of 2016, Dan and Janet relocated to her ancestral family farm in the South Carolina Upstate. He wrote the slipstream/epic-fantasy novel Chene, a prequel to the events in A Madness and Siobeth, in 2017, followed by Books Two and Three in his Goddess Daughter Trilogy — Llyr and Gwynyr — in 2018 and 2019.
From 2018 until the Covid epidemic struck, Dan and Janet revived the farm as Black Sheep Manor Gardens, a commercial market garden specializing in organic heirloom tomatoes. They remain avid homesteaders, but no longer grow for market. Their four hilarious adult children are spread hither and yon.