Stew Magnuson is the author of The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns, a nonfiction history spanning 130 years in the lives of two communities -- the white settler towns in Sheridan County, Nebraska, and the Oglala Lakotas of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
A native of Omaha and a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Magnuson is a Washington, D.C based journalist and former foreign correspondent who has filed stories from Mali, Japan, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Indonesia. He has traveled or lived in forty-six countries, including the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, where he served in the Peace Corps, and Peshawar, Pakistan, where he worked with Afghan refugees in the late 1980s. He is the author of The Song of Sarin, a fictional account of the subway nerve gas attack in Tokyo. He lives in Arlington, Virginia."

He is an associate member of the Western Writers of America.
And a member of the Committee to Protect Journalists.