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Steven Wingate (b. 1964) is a wide-ranging author whose literary output spans multiple genres from traditional fiction to invented form poetry and interactive digital works. Born on March 26, 1964 in Hackensack, New Jersey, he earned a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 1987 and an M.F.A. in Film/Television from Florida State University in 1991. He began his teaching career at the University of Colorado-Boulder in 1995 as an adjunct in the Film Studies Program, then became a full-time instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric in Fall 2001. After a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross, he joined South Dakota State University as Assistant Professor of English in Fall 2011.
Wingate’s first book—the short story collection Wifeshopping, which received the Bakeless Prize in Fiction from Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College—was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2008. It was translated into Bulgarian in 2012. Next came the prose poem chapbook The Birth of Trigonometry in the Bones of Olduvai (2013) and the full-length invented form collection Thirty-One Octets: Incantations and Meditations (2014). By then his creative attention had turned to interactive digital projects, starting with daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir (2014) which premiered at the Art/Science Museum of Singapore. Then followed the interactive video Talk with Your Hands like an Ellis Island Mutt (2015), which premiered in Hong King, and the interactive romance novel Love at Elevation (2018), which was published by Choice of Games and distributed internationally on multiple gaming platforms.
After this Wingate returned to fiction with his novel Of Fathers and Fire (2019), published by the University of Nebraska Press as part of its Flyover Fiction Series, which focuses on the literature of the American Great Plains. He followed this up with a second novel, The Leave-Takers (2021), which is also part of the same series. He retired as Professor in the School of English and Interdisciplinary Studies in 2025 and moved to Northfield, MN with his wife Jennifer—who holds both an M.Ed. and and M.A. from South Dakota State University—and sons Lucas and Landon, who both attend St. Olaf College.