About the Author:

G. Donald Peabody

G. Donald Peabody, author of From the East, Bearing Gifts: Vermont’s Firsts to the Nation, became a twelve year-old “award-winning essayist” courtesy of George Little and the Vermont Council on Foreign Affairs. Shortly thereafter, Edmund Rockwood, editor-publisher of the Vergennes Enterprise and Vermonter, offered Don entrée to journalism as a “stringer,” filing reports from the 1957 National Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge. Don’s followed that muse ever since, writing news articles, essays, poetry, and a couple of plays. Don’s fellow-writers elected him to the maximum three terms as President of the Vermont League of Writers in 1999-2001.

Mr. Peabody relinquished claim to being a “life-long Vermont resident,” going “away” to college—first to Oberlin, where he studied history with Frederic Cheyette, Marcia Colish, and Nathaniel Greenberg, government with J. D. Lewis, Robert Tufts, George Lanyi, and Wilson Carey McWilliams and religion with Clyde Holbrook, and Edward Long—and, subsequently, studying at Yale Divinity School, Southern Connecticut State College's Gerontology Institute, the Jubilee Popular Education Center, and the Alternatives to Violence Program of the New York Religious Society of Friends.

Mr. Peabody holds his terminal degree—an M.F.A. in Writing and Literature awarded in 1998—from Bennington Writing Seminars. He’s taught/facilitated/led courses and workshops in New York and Vermont prisons, at Yale Divinity School, New Haven University, University of Connecticut at Hartford, Institute of Policy Studies and the Joint Center for Political Studies Urban Management Institute.
Don began a lifelong ministry to the disadvantaged teaching Sunday School in the Inner City Protestant Parish of Cleveland, Ohio at St. John’s Episcopal Church. In 1964, while still in college, Mr. Peabody began work in the Executive Office of the President, Office of Economic Opportunity. He left OEO in 1968 to join the national staff of Eugene J. McCarthy for President. Over the next twenty years, he worked his way back to Vermont from D.C. through New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.

Returning to Vermont in the eighties, he lived in Bristol with his first wife, Maria and their daughter, Elena, and worked for the Vermont Dept. of Employment and Training, Addison Community Action/CVOEO, and the Kingsland Bay School. He most recently ran the St. Albans City Housing Authority from which he retired in 2006.

Don now lives with his wife, Lianna Tennal, and two youngest children, Alice and Willard, just off the village green in “The (Once and Future) Littlest City.“