Known for heartwarming portrayals of ordinary people, David R. Yale has been influenced by Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Jo Sinclair, Marge Piercy, and Barbara Kingsolver.

     Living and working in blue collar communities in Brooklyn, Minneapolis, and rural Arkansas, as well as a socialist utopian community in New York, have also shaped his narrative.

   In the 1970s, David was the recreation director at Shingle Creek and Bohannon Parks in North Minneapolis.

     He has taught writing at the University of Minnesota and The School of Visual Arts.

      David’s fiction and poetry has been published in Midstream, Response, Newtown Literary, and Pangolin Review. His short story, The Front Room, won a Writers’ Digest second place award.

     Yale’s book, HomesPun Humor, was a finalist in both the 2014 Indie Excellence® and USA Best Book Awards. His first novel in the Shingle Creek Sagas, Becoming JiJi, won First Place in the 2018 Writer’s Digest Self-Published eBook Awards Contemporary Fiction category, and was a quarter-finalist in the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition.

     A short story excerpted from Becoming JiJi was long-listed for the Lascaux Prize for Short Fiction.

     David has read from his stories at Union College, Claremont College, The Mendota (Minnesota) Jazz Emporium, and UCLA.

     With a blue-collar, working class outlook, Yale writes about one of the most overlooked communities in the contemporary fiction scene.