Don Paul is the author of more than 40 books, including four novels, four screenplays, seven collections of poems, and three stories about dogs, and is also the leader or producer of 29 albums. He was the youngest winner of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, age 20 in 1971. He was a logger in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska and a roughneck in the Gulf of Mexico between 1973 and 1980. He qualified for the 1980 and 1988 U.S. Men's Marathon Trials and held the World Road Best for running 50 Kilometers from 1982 to 1992. In this century, he co-founded Housing Is a Human Right in San Francisco and Rebuild Green for New Orleans and served as Operations Director for Common Ground Collective / Common Ground Relief during the latter seven months of 2006 in New Orleans.

He and Maryse Philippe Déjean, his wife, currently co-direct Sticking Up For Children and work with Partners in Haiti and Louisiana. He's performed over the past several years with Roger Lewis, Kirk Joseph, and Don Vappie in Don Paul and Rivers Answer Moons, most particularly in their DPRAM Quartet, and with Alex de Grassi and Hamid Drake in their The GALLOP Trio.