About Mitch
Mitch Wieland is the author of the novels 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. Named Idaho Book of the Year, God’s Dogs was featured in the annual Best of the West prize anthology, and was a top finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Award.
Wieland’s short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, among other publications. He is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellowship, an Alexa Rose grant, and two Literature Fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
Wieland’s new novel, The Ghosts of Okuma, is set in Japan in the aftermath of the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Wieland lived in Tokyo from 1986-1991, and recently spent two months in Japan researching the novel on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Ghosts of Okuma is represented by Julie Stevenson at Massie & McQuilkin. The novel has received advanced praise from Joy Williams, Charles Baxter, Andrea Barrett, Madison Smartt Bell, Ridley Pearson, Brady Udall, George Pelecanos, and Marion Dayre.
A founder of the MFA program at Boise State University, Wieland served as its director for over a decade. He also started The Idaho Review and was editor-in-chief for twenty years, publishing writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle, Ann Beattie, Ricky Moody, Anthony Doerr, and Rick Bass. Stories from The Idaho Review have been reprinted multiple times in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, New Stories from the South, and Best of the West. Currently in his twenty-seventh year at Boise State, Wieland teaches MFA and BFA classes in fiction writing and publishing/editing.
Interviews with Mitch
Mitch on Idaho Public TV’s Dialogue with Host Marsha Franklin