Stephen L. Brayton is a Sixth Degree Black Belt in the American Taekwondo Association and a Marketing Associate for a software company.

He began writing as a child; his first short story concerned a true incident about his reactions to discipline. During high school, he wrote for the school newspaper and was a photographer for the yearbook. For a Mass Media class, he wrote and edited a video project.

Current publications include Alpha, the first of his Mallory Petersen action mystery series, and Night Shadows, the first in a supernatural series featuring a Homicide detective and an FBI agent.

He is the editor and contributing author of The Peace Tree Mystery, a story set in the Knoxville, Iowa/Lake Red Rock area. 

He has also been published in numerous anthologies of fiction, poems in Lyrical Iowa 2018-2024, and articles in issues of Plant Engineering.