Mitch Wieland
Mitch Wieland is the author of the novels Willy Slater’s Lane and God’s Dogs. His books have received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, been praised by The New York Times and Kirkus Reviews, and named Idaho Book of the Year and optioned for a film. God’s Dogs was a top six finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. His short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Sewanee Review, and twenty other top literary journals. His work has also appeared in the anthologies, The Best of the West and Hello, I Love You: Stories of Romance.
Wieland’s third novel, The Ghosts of Okuma, will be published in November of 2026. The novel has received advance praise from Ann Beattie, Charles Baxter, Andrea Barrett, Anthony Doerr, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Jake Adelstein.
Wieland has been awarded grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, The Idaho Commission on the Arts, The Boise State Arts and Humanities Institute, The Cabin, and The Alexa Rose Foundation. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Alabama, where he studied with legendary writer George Garrett and Harper & Row senior editor Ted Solotaroff.
In 1996, he co-founded the MFA program at Boise State University, and served as its longtime director. In 2024, he was awarded the excellence in graduate mentoring award. Wieland is the 2026 and 2027 Writer in Residence for the state of Idaho.
Wieland is also the founding editor of the award-winning Idaho Review. He edited, formatted, and designed the journal for two decades, publishing writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Joy Williams, Rick Moody, and T.C. Boyle. Stories from The Idaho Review have been reprinted multiple times in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. Wieland has edited the work of 330 writers, publishing over 4000 pages of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. He also taught for ten years at a low-res MFA program in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Before getting his MFA, Wieland taught at Tokyo Foreign Language College in Shinjuku for five years.
