David is a native of Gainesville, Georgia, where he grew up on a farm helping to harvest watermelons and corn, though when he could help it, he avoided chores and was lost in reading a book. Since his exit from Gainesville he has lived in 14 states, including time in New York City and Washington, DC.

He has experienced city life (in New York City he took the subway to work on Fifth Avenue), country life (in North Carolina he lived in a house heated only by a wood stove), and small towns (where people he didn't know recognized him and knew his name). In addition, he has lived for months at a time in Russia, and he spent six weeks in London, England.

After time in the U.S. Air Force, working in a hospital laboratory and acquiring an interest in medical knowledge, he went to college to study the Russian language and later earned additional degrees in English. In the working world, he spent 20 years as a college professor of English, following four occasions as a factory laborer. In addition, he has been an editorial assistant, a dish washer, an asbestos abatement supervisor, nursing home attendant, and a copy editor for a pharmacy journal.

In his life as a writer, David seems to have taken to heart a strong dose of Romantic nonsense as to how a writer is going to live, and he has had a useful exposure to chaos and despair, as well as to falling in love (more or less the same thing). In addition to learning about life by living across the country, he has been through marriages, love affairs, and enough loss and disappointment to know how diamonds must feel while acquiring their facets.

David has been a writer as far back as he remembers, working on novels, short stories, essays, and poems, along with a few newspaper articles and occasional freelance medical writing. To this point, a dozen of the short stories have been published in Crazyhorse; Fiction International; Blue Moon Review; Poets, Artists & Madmen, and other magazines. He also did a two-week writing residency at Vermont Studio Center.

Prior to the collection I'd Tear Down the Stars, he published a novel, The Illusion of Being Here, and he has a blog at Write or Take a Nap?