With all the excitement of announcing our new Managing Editor (Marianne Kunkel) and our new Book Prize Coordinator (Hali Sofala) I kind of neglected to introduce myself. Hi! I’m Theodore Wheeler, the new Blog and Social Networking Editor for Prairie Schooner.
A little about me: I’m a fiction writer who lives in Omaha, with my wife and daughter. (We’re expecting another girl this March!) An alumnus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (BA ’05) I’ve been a reader for Prairie Schooner. the past four years, the past two as a Senior Fiction Reader. My short stories have appeared in Best New American Voices 2009, The Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Confrontation, and numerous other venues. Two of those stories won prizes from Boulevard and The Cincinnati Review—and one of those was a special mention story in the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology and has been used in a class designed to help military veterans and their families address issues of reintegrating into society following their time in combat. My book reviews have been featured in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, The Millions, and Pleiades, and may pop up in this space from time to time. I’ve been awarded scholarships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar, the Port Townsend Writers Conference, and earned an MA in Creative Writing as a fellow at Creighton University. I’m currently working on a novel set in Omaha during World War I and the Red Summer of 1919. And, as you can tell by my photo, I enjoy lounging joyfully among tufts of native prairie grass, as all plains writers do. If you can’t get enough of my blogging, you can always find me at The Uninitiated, my own blog.
I’m very grateful to Kwame and Marianne for giving me the opportunity to help shape The Schooner’s online presence. We’ll have a lot of exciting content for you starting in the new year—more insights from our fantastic roster of contributors and book prize winners, and greater clarity about how we put out the journal, in addition to features that branch out into film, literary news, and new cooperative ventures with literary journals from around the globe. It should be some pretty cool stuff.
We’ll be seeing you…