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C.D. Mitchell was born in Paragould, Arkansas, the oldest of 6 children and raised on a 12 acre chicken farm a stone’s throw from where his parents now live on Rockingchair Road.
While living on the farm he experienced milking cows, making butter, butchering and sugar curing pork, picking and cooking poke salad, raising a garden, and canning jams, jellies, pickles, and tomatoes. After living a short while in Michigan and Illinois, his family returned to Arkansas where he completed high school and then attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He obtained a BSBA in finance and banking, then went on to attend the University of Arkansas School of Law, completing requirements for his Juris Doctorate in December, 1987. In 2002 he decided to return to graduate school to follow his dream of becoming a writer. His second year at McNeese State University was interrupted when his son began treatment for leukemia at ST. Jude’s Medical Center in Memphis. CD transferred to the University of Memphis and completed his MFA with concentrations in fiction and creative nonfiction. While at Memphis CD served as the managing editor for “The Pinch,” the literary journal published by the MFA program. Clayton, his son, has been in remission 8 years.

After a short legal career where he experienced the courtroom as a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a special judge, and a defendant, CD Mitchell began his own construction business. He has worked with the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads as a tracklayer and bridge-man, owned his own BBQ stand and competed in Memphis in May preliminary competitions, raised quarter horses and coonhounds, canned homegrown pickles and tomatoes, and finished with a professional boxing record of 45-5 with 38 knockouts. Tommy Morrison, the former World Heavyweight Champion, won one of his first Toughman contests in fights promoted by CD in Springdale, Arkansas. CD also worked on the locks and dams of the Arkansas River from Toad Suck to Ozark He has been a pallbearer and a groom four times, but has never been a best-man, and that in itself is a story waiting to be written.

CD has served as a juror for the Arkansas State Arts Council in Little Rock and selected recipients for their novelists grants. In Alabama he served as the Visiting Writer for the Mt. Meigs Juvenile Detention Facility as part of the Writing Our Stories Program for the Alabama Writers Forum. He has taught at, participated in, and hosted panels at the Sanibel Island Writer’s Conference, The Gulf Coast Association for Creative Writing Teachers, The Other Words Conference, South Central MLA, Alabama Scholastic Press Association, The Delta Blues Symposium, Lausanne Collegiate School, and the Hemingway Pfieffer Museum and Educational Center.
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