D. Waite is a poet and songwriter who began writing not to build a career — but to survive.

After the loss of his daughter and the unraveling of a long marriage, he found himself in the quiet that follows devastation. In that silence, something unexpected took root. Not anger. Not bitterness. But a steady warmth — a quiet refusal to let pain harden the heart.

He came to call it Warm Defiance.

Following a successful first career, David chose not to slow down, but to begin again. In his sixties, he stepped fully into poetry, storywriting, and songwriting — not as a pastime, but as a calling. What emerged is work shaped not by theory, but by lived experience.

Influenced by writers such as Dylan, Morrison, and Prine, his work carries the cadence of a songwriter and the reflection of a man who has walked through both achievement and loss. His poems, stories, and songs explore grief, fatherhood, love, faith, memory, and the stubborn beauty that remains when everything else falls away.

Living along Lake Erie — where lighthouses stand steady against wind and winter — D. Waite returns often to that image: light held firm in darkness, a symbol of the human spirit.

Warm Defiance is not loud.
It does not shout at the storm.
It stands in it — and stays open.

D. Waite writes in the hope that those who have known loss might recognize themselves in his words — and find the courage to remain warm in a world that so often asks us to harden.