The Lady Is a Spy by Don Mitchell

The Lady Is a Spy by Don Mitchell

Don Mitchell is a writer, book designer, and photographer who specializes in ecological anthropology. He was born and raised in Hilo, Hawai'i, and graduated from Hilo High School. He got a PhD in anthropology from Harvard after studying anthropology, evolutionary biology, and creative writing at Stanford. In the 1960s and 1970s, he lived among the Nagovisi people of Bougainville for several years before returning in 2001 after Bougainville's secession war. He was a professor of anthropology at Buffalo State, a branch of the State University of New York, for many years.

He was a passionate marathon and ultra-marathon runner, as well as a professional road race timer (running Runtime Services for 25 years). He continues to cover huge distances on foot, albeit at a much slower pace. Before returning to his childhood home in Hilo, where he resided with poet Ruth Thompson, he lived in Buffalo and then Colden, New York. They relocated to Ithaca, New York, in 2020.

He wrote an scholarly book and articles about Nagovisi before returning to fiction and poetry in the early 1990s. His pieces have received a Pushcart nomination as well as honors from the Association for Humanistic Anthropology, New Millennium Writings, and other publications. His images have won awards and hung in galleries throughout Hawai'i. He creates book covers for a number of tiny presses.

He was an Artist in Residence for the City of Portales, New Mexico, and shared the Jack Williamson Visiting Professor of English Chair at Eastern New Mexico University with Ruth Thompson in 2019. He was actively involved in concerns relating to Mauna Kea, Hawai'i's tallest and most contentious peak, while in the state.