Mitch Wieland has an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Alabama, and a B.S. in Marketing from San Diego State University. He has taught on the faculty of the Department of English at Boise State University since 1996. One of the founders of Boise State’s MFA program, he was its director for four years, and continues to serve as founding editor of the award-winning literary journal 'The Idaho Review'.
Wieland's novel "Willy Slater’s Lane" received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, and was optioned for a film. The New York Times called the novel “immensely moving.” "God’s Dogs", his novel in stories, was named the Idaho Book of the Year in 2009, a finalist for the 2010 John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and was also cited as a Book of the Year by New West.com. Wieland has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and two Literature Fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. As a Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellow in 2011, he was afforded time and space to work on a major restructuring of a 450-page novel draft called "Enka Men". Set in Japan — where he lived and worked from 1986-1991 — the book follows an American family of four through a year in Tokyo as they restart their lives in the wake of personal financial collapse. Through multiple viewpoints and varied plotlines, the story explores cultural transcendence, social and political boundaries, generational misunderstandings, the changing institution of marriage, unique bonds of family and many other important existential themes.