David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, Tennessee and raised in rural Oklahoma. He attended high school in Mountain View, a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in the southwestern part of the state. As a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Navy, Christner served three years at sea fighting the Vietnam War and two years ashore in Norfolk, VA. After completing his graduate education at the University of Oklahoma, Christner settled in southern Rhode Island and for more than two decades worked as a technical writer, editor and multimedia training developer for a variety of defense contractors and hi-tech multinational corporations during the day and wrote plays and novels at night. His stage plays The Wall, Bui-Doi: The Dust of Life, The Walk, Red Hot Mamas, The Babe, The Bard and the Baron, The Bitch of Baily's Beach, Ezra and Evil, What About Mimi?, and This Blood's For You have been finalists or winners in national/international playwriting competitions. Speculations on the cosmos, sex, war, religion, injustice, environmental exploitation, aging, women's issues, the homeless, the colonial slave trade and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. His plays have been produced in the U.S. Australia, Japan, Belgium, India, Italy and Canada. An Italian translation of Red Hot Mamas by Leonardo Franchini opened in Trento, Italy in 2016. Victor Weber's Russian translation premiers in Tula, Russia in May. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI. "American Pies" is one of his 19 full-length plays.