Steve Wagner was born in northern Wisconsin, now resides in southern Wisconsin, and rarely leaves Wisconsin. He prefers to travel in both time and space “with books and the imagination” while planted firmly in a comfortable armchair with a beverage at his side. As a result, he’s read thousands of books, consumed more than his fair share of coffee and wine, and is now rather more chair-shaped than is perhaps good for him.
Steve lingered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for six years and emerged with a BA in Classics and English, after which he spent several years in graduate school in the department of English at the University of Virginia. After he left graduate school with a Master’s Degree (and then some) he could not read fiction for more than a year–the urge to analyze and theorize was too strong. He’s since recovered from this terrible malady but still bears the scars, though they are fading with time.
After leaving graduate school, he’s worked as a technical writer and editor, web developer, and all-around communications factotum in both the private and public sectors. Steve now coordinates communications for a transportation-related research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and occasionally provides freelance editorial services. He’s also been accepted by the library school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will matriculate in the Fall of 2010.
Steve lives with nearly two thousand books, an aging cat, and a seemingly forever young female pitbull in the house he shares with his wife on Madison’s East side, where they are slowing converting their tiny residential lot into an equally tiny urban farm. Besides being an avid and obsessive reader, Steve prizes strong coffee, Chinese tea, dark malty ales, Irish whiskey, and reasonably priced Argentinian wines.
Steve’s favorite authors are too numerous to name. Lately he’s read wonderful new books by Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, John Irving, David Lodge, Hilary Mantel, and Adrian Goldsworthy and excellent older books by Samuel Beckett, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol, Alice Munro, and Michel de Montaigne, Vladimir Nabokov, Patrick O’Brian, and John Updike.
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