Helmut Stefan is a retired Chicago public school teacher who loves to read and to travel. Both of these passions have inspired him to write his stories, which always have an international flair. In 1998 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to study "Mozart, the Man, his Music and his Vienna." This experience led him to write Trio in D minor, which was published in 2005. He and his wife Ingrid and their grown children live in the Chicago area.