Donna McVicar Kazo

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Donna is proud to be an American citizen, having lived in Florida, primarily South Florida, since her early teens. She has been a professional artist since the age of 20, when she sold her first dog portrait. Donna has been a professional editor since January 1991, when she became Associate/Art Director of "Tropical Fruit News" magazine for the Rare Fruit Council International of Miami, Florida, for ten years, creating 100 monthly issues.

Donna continues to create artwork when she is not paddling a canoe, building websites, making videos, writing, editing and publishing books, and posting essays on Medium and LinkedIn. Having retired from decades of painting highly detailed animal portraiture in pastels, she has been experimenting with fractals, acrylic mediums and pigments, bold textures and energy patterns. Lately she has gotten into digital painting.

Together with her soulmate and husband Dr. Thomas Kazo, Donna in 1993 founded Wildlife Research Team, Inc., a nonprofit environmental education organization. WRT uses its own fleet of volunteer-paddled black canoes to accomplish environmental projects, habitat restoration, and waterway and coastal cleanups throughout South Florida. Chosen by NOAA as an Environmental Hero of 2003, it was Tom’s dream to provide people from all walks of life with the opportunity to also become environmental heroes. Although Tom tragically passed away in 2006, Donna still leads Wildlife Research Team and continues to embrace his mission.

Beginning in 1981 with "Ferry Command," Donna’s father, Captain Donald M. McVicar, KC, OBE, began to publish his memoirs; his dynamic six-decade career had spanned the Golden Age of Aviation. Capt. McVicar’s books were well-received in the aviation community but are long out of print. The demand for quality non-fiction aviation from that time period has only grown in recent years, particularly in exciting authentic World War II first-person aviation stories. Along with her daughter Christianna Cannon, an artist, copy editor and technical writer, Donna took on the mission of republishing her dad’s memoirs with their company, Words On Wings Press LLC. Thanks to Amazon KDP, these freshly edited and illustrated classics are being welcomed back by the world as Kindle ebooks and paperbacks.

Donna has authored her own books. Her 353-page memoir, "Tom Kazo and Me: Love, Strength, Miracles," was an intensely emotional and therapeutic journey for her. At 6'5" and a highly trained Green Beret and policeman, Tom was a universe of contradictions, a fallen hero who she rescued from a death sentence. While in the midst of writing her memoir, Donna wrote a short book to honor Tom's service in Vietnam, along with his MP Sentry Dog, Rhett, a dog Tom mourned until his last breath. Tom had a wonderful, unique way with words. Donna edited his columns for "Tropical Fruit News," and together they wrote nature essays. In 2023 Donna published a compilation of nineteen of Tom's articles and some of their nature writing in "Off the Beaten Path" adding a succinct biography as well as the origin story of the Rare Fruit Council; this book is available as a paperback and on Kindle.