Bernard J. MacDonald spent more than three decades in classrooms before he ever published a novel — teaching special education in Gresham, Oregon, then training educators across Florida. That decades-long career quietly shaped the fiction he began publishing in 2010, starting with Missing You, a love story set against the fog of Alzheimer's disease.
Since then, MacDonald has built a small but resonant catalog: Meet Me In Sedona (2011), which follows a heartbroken man into the red-rock country of the American Southwest; Infidel: Kafir (2012), a cross-cultural romance testing family honor against forbidden love; and Zion: Trails End (2020), the story of a terminally ill retired firefighter who interrupts his own end to rescue a stranger — and finds an unexpected second chance at life alongside her.
In 2026, that backlist is finding new readers. Writers Way Solutions has released updated editions of both Infidel: Kafir and Zion, the latter retitled Zion: End of Trail, and MacDonald recently discussed Infidel on the Writers Way Podcast. The book was also named a finalist in the 2026 Eric Hoffer Book Award.
Across all four novels, MacDonald returns to the same emotional territory: characters facing grief, illness, or cultural pressure, set against the wide-open landscapes of the American West that MacDonald knows firsthand through his own hiking and camping. It's fiction that reads like a second act — shaped less by literary ambition than by a career spent helping people navigate hard things.
MacDonald now lives in Saint Augustine, Florida, where he continues to write.
