Born and raised in Norwich, Connecticut, Don grew up hearing first-hand stories of WWII partisan fighters from friends of his parents. These stories, absorbed during childhood, probably inspired a more scholarly interest in the politics of resistance later captured in his fiction. The question “Why didn’t more victims fight back?” or, more pointedly, “What happened to the people who did fight back?” became one of the thematic building blocks of The Master Planets. His love of Rock & Roll came from a different place: way down inside. Like most people of his generation, Don watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. At age ten, he knew instinctively that, in the span of a single hour-long television program, the world had undergone a sea-change in attitude towards youth and creativity. From that moment on, he listened rapturously to every new song on the radio, every new innovation in popular music. He recognized in rock n’ roll, in all its permutations, a music that resonated with the feelings he had about himself and world around him. His first completed novel, Ain’t No Sin to Rock and Roll, was optioned for film. His second, Tina’s ’68 Mustang, is under revision. The Master Planets is Don’s third completed novel.
Don received his BA (English) from Connecticut College, his MA (English) from Rowan University, and his Doctorate (Education) from Rutgers University. For 23 years he has taught high school English in Southern New Jersey. Known to his students as “Doc G,” Don has distributed thousands of bathroom passes in his time, and has arbitrated numerous battles over vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric in the uphill struggle of teaching “Confrontational Language Arts” to New Jersey adolescents. Don’s the recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dodge Foundation, and the Johnson & Johnson Foundation (which funded his study of source materials at the U.S. Holocaust Museum). He lives in New Jersey, with his wife, author Doni Tamblyn. Currently he is working on his next novel, Stupid School, and a collection of short stories.
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