Mitch Wieland holds an MFA from The University of Alabama, and once served as fiction editor of Black Warrior Review. Wieland is currently a full professor at Boise State University, where he has taught for fifteen years. One of the founders of Boise State’s MFA program, he was its director for four years. Wieland founded The Idaho Review in 1998.
Wieland is the author of Willy Slater’s Lane and God’s Dogs. Willy Slater’s Lane received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, and was optioned for a film. The New York Times called the novel “immensely moving.” God’s Dogs has been named the current Idaho Book of the Year. Featured in Best of the West, God’s Dogs was a finalist for the 2010 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. The novel was also cited as a “Book of the Year” by New West.com. Richard Ford said the stories in God’s Dogs have “great breadth, powerful sympathies, and a renewing comprehension of our human selves which we only find in the best literature.”
Wieland’s short stories have appeared in The Best of the West, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and other publications.
Wieland is the recipient of a 2007 Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and two Literature Fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. As a current Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellow, he is working on a novel set in Japan. He lives in Boise with his wife Cynthia, an artist, and his son Benjamin, the drummer in the rock band, Jumping Sharks.
A recipient of many awards and fellowships, Brady Udall received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His widely anthologized stories and non-fiction have been published in journals and magazines such as Story, Esquire, GQ and The Paris Review. He is the author of a short story collection, Letting Loose the Hounds, and a novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, which was an international bestseller and translated into more than twenty languages.
His most recent book, The Lonely Polygamist, made The New York Times extended bestsellers list and was named one of the ten best fiction books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly. It was listed as the #1 Novel of the Year by Entertainment Weekly. The novel was also named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, the Kansas City Star, and Amazon.com.
Udall is the current Idaho writer-in-residence, an honor awarded every three years by the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
