Author · Novellas · American Nonfiction

Daniel B. Rundquist

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At fifteen he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, graduated from Independence High School in 1986, attended UNC-Charlotte for two years, and transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill in 1988, graduating in 1991 with a BA in Labor and Industrial Relations. He married Melany Carriker in 1988; they have three grown sons.

“When I was in middle school I began to write short stories and articles only to see what I could accomplish. I was soon writing a regular column for the school newspaper — my first writing gig at fourteen. I loved listening to Paul Harvey and Charles Kuralt because they clearly understood the craft of storytelling. Storytelling is entirely different from reporting, and relatively few people master it. I wanted to be a storyteller with my writing.”

He began his career with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in 1991 as a Canteen Officer running in-hospital retail and food service, entered the grocery business in 1993, and in 2001 was promoted to Category Manager for the largest grocery wholesaler in North Carolina — the move that brought him to Hickory, where he still lives after retiring from that industry.

He learned the craft by reading people who wrote well — Jefferson, Franklin, Samuel and John Adams, Paine, Washington. In 1995 he founded and published a fully funded monthly newsletter in Winston-Salem. In Hickory his work turned to the western novella series The Legend of Striker's Gold, then to nonfiction with Tears for Byzantium (2017) and The Unholy Land (2021), and back to fiction with The Fourth Relic (2021) and The King's Chalice (2024).

He wrote for the Caldwell Journal from 2016 to 2020 with more than thirty-five published articles, and has been a staff writer for Whiskey Network Magazine since 2024 with nearly forty more.