Don Mitchell was born and raised in Hilo, Hawai‘i and graduated from Hilo High School in 1960. He studied anthropology, evolutionary biology, and creative writing at Stanford and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. He did years of ecological anthropology fieldwork among the Nagovisi people of Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, and was Research Fellow at the Australian National University Research School of Pacific Studies. He taught at Buffalo State College for more than thirty years and during that time was a pioneer in computerized road race (running) timing, competed as a marathoner and ultra-marathoner, and finally rekindled the writing career he’d hoped to have as an undergraduate. His stories and poems have won awards from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, New Millennium Writings, and others.

His photographs have won competitions and hung in Cambridge, Hawai‘i, Palo Alto, and Ithaca. He designs books for several small presses, has been a Visiting Artist for the city of Portales, NM, Visiting Professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University, and has read from his work in New York, Hawai‘i, California, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Georgia and Washington, DC. In 2013, he and the poet Ruth Thompson returned to his childhood home in Hilo, where he was actively involved in matters concerning Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i’s tallest and most contested mountain, which has been a major part of his life since he was a boy. They have lived near Ithaca, NY since mid-2020. His books include A Red Woman Was Crying (ethnographic fiction, set on Bougainville) and Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton’s Murder (memoir, a large portion of which is set on the Big Island). Both are from Saddle Road Press.

His own site is at don-mitchell.com