Daniel Peters

With two novels from his Mesoamerican trilogy translated into Italian and German, DANIEL PETERS has an international following as a major historical novelist. In addition, two of his novels are semiautobiographical and explore both the emotions and the politics of their respective times.

In Peters’ Border Crossings, the rebellious student movements of the late 1960s come alive as vital personal stories. The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica are resurrected in all their passion and glory in The Luck of Huemac, a novel about the Aztecs, in Tikal, a novel about the Maya, and in The Incas, a novel about an empire that stretched from present-day Bolivia to Peru to parts of Ecuador. In Rising from the Ruins, an archaeological site on the Mexico-Guatemala border in the 1980s emerges as a window into the lives of ancient peoples as well as a political battleground and a bloody region of carnage against today's Indigenous peoples.

Both his autobiographical novels and his historical novels introduce readers to characters—fictional and real—who are alive, compelling, and wholly believable. Even the foreign and the exotic become familiar and recognizable.

Daniel Peters, born in Milwaukee in 1948, was an athlete and star basketball player in both high school and college. In 1970 he graduated from Yale as an English major. 

Because of his opposition to the Vietnam War and the fact that he drew number twenty-three in the draft lottery that year, Peters fled to British Columbia, Canada, with his new wife—and former Yale professor—Annette Kolodny, an internationally known feminist writer and literary critic. Fluent in Spanish, Annette joined him on all of his research

Based on extensive research in the field, years of visiting archaeological sites, much study, and almost forty years of ongoing conversations with archaeologists and anthropologists, all of Peters’ historical novels accurately and sensitively recreate the details of their times and places. By recreating the past, Peters believes, he offers new ways of seeing the present. As he stated in a lecture he delivered in 2008 at a conference sponsored by Tulane University in New Orleans, "Given the slipperiness of the past--especially the ancient past--it is heartening to think that we can come to know it--and thus ourselves--better."

Daniel Peters can be contacted directly at djp322@comcast.net.

In May 2008, Daniel delivered a paper titled "Incidents of Travel & Research into the Pre-Columbian Past" at the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) in New Orleans. In this paper, Dan muses about the challenges and adventures of recovering the long-lost past of ancient civilizations.

To download a PDF of that presentation, click HERE.