David Lunde was born in Berkeley, California in 1941, but moved with his parents to Saudi Arabia in 1946, where the Arabian American Oil Company communities of Dhahran and Abqaiq were his home for the next sixteen years. After graduating from Knox College in 1963, Lunde attended the U. of Iowa Writer's Workshop on the recommendation of Archibald MacLeish. While there, he was awarded the Old Gold Fellowship in Writing and won the Academy of American Poets Prize. After earning his M.F.A. degree, he taught literature and creative writing and directed the creative writing program at the State University of New York at Fredonia for the next 34 years.

Lunde has been Co-Editor and Publisher of The Basilisk Press, Contributing Editor of Escarpments, Managing Editor of Drama & Theater, and Poetry Editor of The Riverside Quarterly.  He was granted  a Yaddo residency, and has won two Rhysling Awards for “Best Science Fiction Poem of the Year.”  He is the author of eight books and chapbooks of poems, including the ‘mainstream' collections, Calibrations, Sludge Gulper 1, Heart Transplants & Other Misappropriations, and Instead,  and the ‘speculative' collections, Blues for Port City, and Nighfishing in Great Sky River. With collaborator Mary M.Y. Fung, he published The Carving of Insects, a translation of the collected poems of the 20^th C. Chinese poet Bian Zhilin, which won the 2007 PEN USA Translation Award.  His poems, stories and translations have appeared internationally in more than 250 periodicals and anthologies.

After retiring from his teaching position in 2001, Lunde and his wife, fantasy writer Patricia A. McKillip, moved to North Bend, Oregon. So far, in addition to writing and translating, he has helped found the Speculative Literature Foundation (www.speclit.org) and became its Newsletter Editor,  and has become manager of the bookstore at the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, and a member of the board of directors of Friends of the South Slough.