Don Zancanella won the John S. Simmons/Iowa Short Fiction Award and an O.Henry Prize. One of his stories was cited as a distinguished story of the year in the 2019 Best American Short Stories. He has published widely in literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, The Hopkins Review, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, The Alaska Quarterly, and Epiphany. He was born in Laramie, Wyoming, and has lived in Virginia, Colorado, Missouri, and New Mexico, where he taught at the University of New Mexico. He studied with John Edgar Wideman, Thoreau and Emerson scholar Robert D. Richardson, and John Williams, author of Stoner.

He is the author of two novels, CONCORD, about a year in the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Peabody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Serving House Books); and A STORM IN THE STARS, about Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the writing of Frankenstein (Delphinium/HarperCollins). His next novel, ANIMALS OF THE ALPINE FRONT, will be published in August 2024, again by Delphinium/HarperCollins.

Don lives in Boise, Idaho, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife and their dogs.