Donna is the author of The Silver Baron’s Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Foreword Reviews winner, American Book Awards Legacy Finalist, Will Rogers Medallion Award Finalist, more), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist), Sometimes You Sense the Difference (poetry chapbook), Letting Rain Have Its Say (poetry book), and Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton (Foreword Reviews Finalist). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet, an interfaith literary journal. She has received a Bread Loaf Scholarship, Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars Fellowship, grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and Poetry Society of Virginia, a Scholarship from the Summer Literary Seminars, and more.

Donna’s writing has appeared in Next Avenue, Virginia Quarterly Review, Saturday Evening Post, Writer’s Digest, Confrontation, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, Washingtonian, New Ohio Review, and many other journals as well as in the anthologies I’ve Always Meant to Tell You (Pocket Books) and To Fathers: What I’ve Never Said (featured in O Magazine).

Highlights of Donna’s career have been seeing one of her short stories performed by Tony Award winning actress MaryAnn Plunkett at the Playwrights Theatre in Madison, NJ, in 2006, and three of her stories-turned-into-plays read at the Salmagundi Club in Manhattan in 2023 and 2024. Her short story “On the Banks of the Save” was a quarter-finalist in the 2015 ScreenCraft Short Story Awards.

In an earlier incarnation, Donna was an award-winning copywriter for Smithsonian, Time-Life, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and many other environmental and nonprofit clients in the direct marketing industry.
www.donnabaierstein.com