As a child, Donna Baier Stein wrote her first story, “Melissa in Book World” about a little girl who lived underwater in a world of books. As an adult, she’s happy to have had that foreshadowing come true. She is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. She is the recipient of the PEN/New England Discovery Award, Foreword Reviews Award, Bread Loaf Scholarship, Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars Fellowship, Iowa Fiction Award Finalist, and more. Her work has been featured on NPR, PBS, Washingtonian, Saturday Evening Post, and O Magazine.
Donna is the author of the bestselling The Silver Baron’s Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Foreword Reviews Bronze Winner in General Fiction, American Book Awards Legacy Finalist, Will Rogers Medallion Award Finalist, more), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist), Letting Rain Have Its Say (poetry book), and Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton (Foreword Reviews Finalist). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet, an interfaith literary journal. She has received grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and Poetry Society of Virginia, a Scholarship from the Summer Literary Seminars, and more. Donna’s writing has appeared in Next Avenue, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and many other journals as well as in the anthologies I’ve Always Meant to Tell You (Pocket Books) and To Fathers: What I’ve Never Said. Highlights of Donna’s career have been seeing one of her short stories performed by Tony Award winning actress MaryAnn Plunkett at the Playwrights Theatre in Madison, NJ, in 2006, and four of her stories-turned-into-plays read at the Salmagundi Club in Manhattan. Her short story “On the Banks of the Save” was a quarter-finalist in the ScreenCraft Short Story Awards and several written pieces were official selections in the 2025 London Global Film Awards and WRPN Women’s International Film Festival.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Donna Baier Stein’s Courtesan of the Buddha in the summer of 2027.
