Born in 1945, Donald  Lystra was raised in the cities, towns, suburbs  and countryside of Michigan. As a young man he worked as an auto plant worker, a door-to-door salesman, a dishwasher, a housepainter, and a shipyard engineer. He eventually settled into a career as a consulting electrical engineer, though in his fifties he began to write fiction in a serious way. His work has been widely praised for the strong emotion captured in its quiet understated prose. He is the recipient of two gold medals from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association, and he was twice named a Michigan Notable Book author by the Library of Michigan. Lystra has received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. He and his wife divide their time between a farm in northern Michigan and a small town on the ocean side of Florida.