"Writing fiction is the most interesting and challenging thing I've ever tried. It's hard work, but it's a blast." — Don Gordon Pierson
Don Gordon Pierson has been writing in one form or another since he was ten years old, growing up in the cave country of south-central Kentucky. Although storytelling came early, his professional life led him into the chemical industry, where he spent most of his career as a specialist in adhesive formulation and processing — and became an inventor on three U.S. patents.
After retiring, Pierson rediscovered his long-standing interest in writing. In 2010 he produced Eighty-eight Keys, a collection of poems and song lyrics he had written over the years. The project rekindled his creative ambitions, and in 2014 he decided to take on a new challenge: long-form fiction.
He spent the next few years studying the craft before publishing his first novel, Ambiguous, in 2018. The idea for the story grew out of a summer trip to Paris with his three teenage children and follows a widowed mother who uncovers unsettling secrets from her late husband's past.
In 2020, during the pandemic, Pierson published The un-Natural Aging Process, a coming-of-age mystery shaped by the time and place of his own youth. His most recent book, The Twelve Sisters, a mystery-thriller set in Italy, was written with co-author David Thompson Dorris.
He is currently working on a novel inspired by real events that explores the difficult choices parents face while raising a child with profound disabilities — and the deeper question of what truly makes a life meaningful.
Pierson is also a singer-songwriter whose album of fourteen Americana songs is titled Another Man's Treasure. He divides his time between the Philadelphia area and the Caribbean island of Montserrat. His interests include finger-style guitar, abstract painting, tai chi, photography, travel, and reading about forty novels a year.