Biography

Donald Anderson was born in Butte, Montana in 1946. His fiction and essays have appeared in The North American Review, Fiction International, Epoch, PRISM international, Western Humanities Review, Columbia, Michigan Quarterly Review, Connecticut Review, and elsewhere. In 1989, became Editor of War, Literature & the Arts: an International Journal of the Humanities, a position he held for more than 30 years. He’s editor, too, of aftermath: an anthology of post-vietnam fiction (Henry Holt, 1995), Andre Dubus: Tributes (Xavier University Press, 2001), When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers’ Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq (University of Iowa Press, 2008), and Quagmire: Personal Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). His story “Fire Road” was awarded First Place in the Society for the Study of the Short Story 2000 Contest, and the collection Fire Road won Iowa’s 2001 John Simmons Short Fiction award. His essay “Gathering Noise” was named a “Notable Essay of 2012” in the 2013 The Best American Essays. His essay “Rock Salt” was listed in 2008 and his essay “Luck” was listed in 1999. In 1996, he received a Creative Writers’ Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds an MFA from Cornell University. For more than 30 years, he taught Creative Writing and War Literature at the United States Air Force Academy. His book, Gathering Noise from My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir (University of Iowa Press, 2012), was named by the Christian Science Monitor as one of “12 Electrifying Memoirs” appearing in 2012. Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet (University of New Mexico Press, 2018) was listed in the Chicago Review of Books as among “The Best Books About Climate Change of 2018.” His most recent book is Fragments of a Mortal Mind: a nonfiction novel (University of Nevada Press, 2021).