About Mitch
Mitch Wieland’s third novel, The Ghosts of Okuma, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in 2026. In the new novel, a teenager from San Diego searches the streets of Tokyo for his runaway sister. The young American soon befriends a mysterious but charismatic Fukushima refugee, who agrees to help him track down his sister in exchange for joining her solo crusade against nuclear power.
Wieland lived in Tokyo from 1986 to 1991. In 2012, he spent two months in Japan researching the novel on a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a year-long fellowship from the Boise State University Arts and Humanities Institute. The novel has received advance praise from Joy Williams, Charles Baxter, Andrea Barrett, Anthony Doerr, Madison Smartt Bell, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Ridley Pearson, Marion Dayre, and Brady Udall.
Wieland’s first novel, Willy Slater’s Lane, was awarded starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist and received high praise from The New York Times and Kirkus. The book was later optioned for a film. His second novel, God’s Dogs, was a top finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award and became Idaho Book of the Year, earning endorsements from Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford and Anthony Doerr. His short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Best of the West, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and The Sewanee Review, among numerous other journals. He’s been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Idaho Commission on the Arts, The Cabin, and the Alexa Rose Foundation.
Wieland is the founding editor of the award-winning Idaho Review—publishing writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle, Ann Beattie, and Rick Moody—and co-founder and longtime director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Boise State. Now in his twenty-eighth year at the university, he teaches fiction writing, narrative structure, and publishing classes in the MFA and BFA/BA programs in creative writing.
Interviews with Mitch
Mitch on Idaho Public TV’s Dialogue with Host Marsha Franklin