Steve Wiegenstein is an academic scholar of utopian movements, a fiction writer, and a fifth-generation native of the Ozarks. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he published Ozark Review, a literary journal, while working as a newspaper reporter. Before starting his novel series, he wrote a considerable amount of short fiction, which has been published in Southern Humanities Review, Louisiana Literature, Nebraska Review, Oxford Magazine, and others. He is also a dedicated promoter of writing in Missouri and spent two terms as president of the Missouri Writers’ Guild. Slant of Light was the runner-up for the 2012 Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction. Its sequel, This Old World, was published in September 2014 and was one of three finalists for the M.M. Bennetts Award in Historical Fiction.
“There is so much published that is all the same. Yet there burns that desire to create something that does not exist. Especially for the Ozarks. Something that is not exactly like anything else under the sun.”
