Founder/ Editor
David S. Wills founded Beatdom in the summer of 2007, just after graduating (with an MA in American Literature) from the University of Dundee. Since then, he has remained the magazine’s editor-in-chief while working and travelling around the world. He has run a bookshop in South Korea, farmed in California, lectured in China, made cider in Cambodia, run a marathon in North Korea, and currently focuses on writing and editing for Beatdom.
His first novel, The Dog Farm, was published in 2011, followed by Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’ in 2013. World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller was published in 2019 and High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism was released in 2021. In 2023, he published Murakamian Magical Realism and Psychological Trauma.
Apart from Beatdom, David has written for LitHub, Quillette, Empty Mirror, the Allen Ginsberg Estate, the US Library of Congress, American Book Review, Litro, and many more publications. He has been quoted or cited in The New York Times, Harper’s, and Time. He has lectured on the Beat Generation in various countries and taught academic writing for the University of Worcester and USTC. He currently writes about Haruki Murakami for the Wind-up Blog.
You can read more about David at www.davidswills.com, on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A select list of his publications can be found here.
