Donna Chaffee was born and raised in Los Angeles and attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she began working in Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office in 1965.
After transferring to the University of California, Berkeley during her junior year, she remained connected to Kennedy’s political circle, working in his Senate office during the summer of 1967 and later volunteering for his 1968 presidential campaign. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Political Science and went on to spend more than twenty years working as a financial manager for Los Angeles County.
In retirement, Chaffee has traveled to more than seventy countries, taken more than fifty cruises, and become actively involved in wildlife conservation efforts in Africa, including volunteer work at a cheetah sanctuary in Namibia. She also runs a large online community dedicated to protecting cheetahs.
Her previous novel, Overboard, was a quarterfinalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award competition.