About Me

I’ve written lots of bios over the years, and the most recent ones have been in connection to a song, a short story or my novel, HOUSE OF WATER. They always started about the same – “Douglas Peters lives in central Italy with his wife, Martha, and their 21-year-old Maine Coon cat.” The year before, the phrase was “and their 20-year-old Maine Coon cat.” In 2015, when we began living in Italy nearly full-time, she was 14, a full life for the breed, but not for her. Her name was Sera, short for Serendipity, and her 14th trans-Atlantic flight was in early December 2022, just a few days before we had to release her into whatever lies beyond her last breath. In Italy, her bed was across from my writing desk, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she stared at me, undoubtedly urging me to write a phrase or a paragraph better, because who better than a cat to know when something is less than interesting. So, with this loss in mind . . .

Douglas Peters lives in central Italy with his wife, Martha, except when they return to Iowa City, IA, during the summers. His novel, HOUSE OF WATER, is set in his small Umbrian town, a village filled with legends and stories from Roman and medieval years. He has also written memoir, essays, short stories and nearly 200 songs. In 2019, he was privileged to win the Giuseppe Carpanacci Concorso Nazionale e Internazionale Poesia e Prosa, English Division.