Donna Obeid grew up outside Detroit, Michigan. She studied English literature at the University of Michigan, graduating with honors, and earned an MA and MFA from American University, where she was a teaching fellow. She later spent two years as a visiting scholar in Thailand.

Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in more than thirty literary journals and anthologies, including The Baltimore Review, Carve, Ghost Parachute, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Los Angeles Review, and Portland Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize and named a finalist for the Julia Peterkin Literary Award, New Flash Fiction Review Award, and Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee.

She lives in Northern California, where she works at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.