Donald Motier is the author of twenty books, including five collections of poetry, nine novels, two biographies and two travel books. In 2012 and 2014 he published two historical novels, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Lost Journal of William Wallace Lincoln and Saving Lincoln: Mystic Chords of Memory Part 2. While doing research for those two books he discovered that Willie Lincoln, who was most like his father in temperament, intelligence and empathy and who tragically died in the White House on February 20, 1862 at age eleven of small pox and typhoid, is the author's 3rd cousin 2x removed. His biography of Willie He Had Rare Lights was published in 2019 and was praised by the best living scholar on Abraham Lincoln and his family Dr. Wayne C. Temple as A great book by the leading authority on the life of Willie Lincoln.