David Clark Done

David Done spent decades navigating boardrooms across five continents. He has negotiated across cultures, watched ambition collide with reality in a dozen languages, and witnessed the machinery of global commerce shape and misshape human lives at every latitude. Now, he writes about what all of that leaves behind. He is a poet, a novelist, and a performer whose work carries the unmistakable authority of a man who has actually lived. Where other writers theorize about reinvention, Done has embodied it twice over, and without apology.

There is a particular clarity that comes from standing in a boardroom in one time zone and a mountain range in another from spending decades watching the forces of commerce shape the choices men and women make when the stakes are real. David spent his career inside that machinery as an international business executive. He knows what ambition costs, what failure teaches, and what it means to start over from a position of hard-won wisdom rather than naïve hope. This biography is not incidental to his writing. it is his writing. The humor in his fiction carries the edge of someone who has seen deals collapse. The spiritual longing in his poetry carries the weight of someone who has crossed too many borders to believe that any single map tells the whole truth. David did not arrive at literature as a retreat from the world. He arrived at it as its most precise instrument.

His debut novel, Gone Bodfishin’, is a comic adventure set against the vivid backdrop of Bodfish, California a book that follows a man's pursuit of something he cannot quite name, surrounded by characters who are trying, failing, and trying again in the most gloriously human ways. It is a novel about the American Dream as it actually lives: sideways, surprising, and stubbornly alive. With its hapless good ol’ boys, get-rich-quick schemes, a movie ranch, a map to a lost gold mine, and a donkey named Andy, it is an unapologetically entertaining book with a quietly serious heart. His poetry work includes the celebrated The Great Equinox: Three Generations, Four Voices, a rare and remarkable anthology in which David’s voice joins those of three generations of poets from his own family line, spanning a century of verse and four distinct voices united by kinship, the American West, and a fierce love of language. Scholar Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown of Naropa University described it as “a tour de force to be savored again and again,” and poet Andrew Schelling praised its “abundance and overflow.” The collection stands as evidence of David’s core conviction: that poetry is not merely personal expression, but an act of transmission of carrying something essential forward through time.

Formally trained in English with a concentration in Poetics at California State University, East Bay, Done brings structural discipline to emotional fearlessness, a combination that reflects his dual inheritance: the rigor of international commerce and the openness demanded by serious literary craft. Several new novels are forthcoming.

Literature exists to tell the truths that comfort refuses to touch. I write because the human experience, its ambitions, its absurdities, its grief, its grace and deserves witnesses, not censors. Poetry is not ornament; it is evidence. Every story I tell is an argument against forgetting: forgetting where we came from, forgetting what we’re capable of, forgetting that reinvention is not just possible but necessary. I believe that history is not a museum exhibit, it is a living pressure on the present moment. And I believe that the writer’s job, above all, is to stay honest about what that pressure feels like from the inside — David Done

David’s creative life extends well beyond the written page. An active stage actor, he is also preparing to perform in his first musical, a development that surprises no one who has read his work, where the theatrical and the lyrical have always been close neighbors. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two canine companions, drawing daily from a landscape that is, in his words, relentless about beauty.