Born in Dover, Ohio, Mitch Wieland has lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tuscaloosa, and Tokyo, Japan.His first book, Willy Slater's Lane, received starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly and Booklist, and was optioned for a film. The New York Times called Willy Slater's Lane "immensely moving." His short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other publications. God's Dogs, his new novel in stories, was published in 2009. A story from the book, "The Bones of Hagerman," was one of 18 selected for the prize anthology Best of the West 2009, and appears alongside stories by Annie Proulx, Joyce Carol Oates, and Louise Erdrich. Best of the West also short-listed the title story from God's Dogs, and a third story earned a 2009 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. God's Dogs has received high praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford and NPR "All Things Considered" book commentator Alan Cheuse, among others.Mitch holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, where he was fiction editor of The Black Warrior Review. He teaches in the MFA Program at Boise State University, and serves as founding editor of The Idaho Review. He is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship and two Literature Fellowships from The Idaho Commission on the Arts. He is currently working on a novel set in Tokyo, Japan. He lives in Boise with his wife and son.