Deanna’s interest in writing began at the age of 8 when she wrote various poems and stories for her school newspaper at St. Bonaventure. She thought seriously about becoming a writer, but her love of design won out and she earned a BFA in Industrial Design from Carnegie-Mellon University. CMU had a huge influence on her writing. Jim Daniels' poetry class taught her the beauty of a simple, straightforward, but eloquent writing style through his poetry about blue-collar workers in the dying Detroit auto industry. She began her career in user interaction design by moving from Pittsburgh, PA to the Silicon Valley. She applied both her sense of design and use of good language to many electronic products, including designing the interface for the NuvoMedia Rocket eBook, (an early ebook reader several years pre-Kindle), ultimately writing a chapter for a book of case studies on user-centered design. Her writing was jump-started when she moved to Palo Alto and began reading the Palo Alto Weekly. She entered their annual short-story contest in September 2000, winning second place.

She has completed her first novel, HALFWAY TO CUBA, and is currently at work on her second novel.