Donald Nelson Gallinger (born May 4, 1953) is an American writer. He is the author of several novels. His most recent work, The Master Planets (2008), which received strong reviews in Booklist, , and , tells the story of one Polish partisan fighter’s savagery during World War II and its devastating effects on her American family years later. Centering on the fictional woman’s teenage son, a Rock & Roll wunderkind, the novel seeks to show how the unknown past can reach into the unwary present and alter it forever.