Steven Wright’s debut novel, The Coyotes of Carthage, has been described as a “tense mystery”, “nouveau southern gothic”, and a “tragicomedy.” It is also a dead-on description of the current state of electoral politics told as a story where those political machinations take on a life of its own. Here, a somewhat burnt-out D.C. political operative is a hired by a mining company to use the tools of his trade to, essentially, convince a southern community to cut it’s own throat. Things rarely go as planned. The Coyotes of Carthage (Ecco, 2020).
About the author: Steven Wright is a Professor at the UW Law School and in the Creative Writing Dept. He is also Co-Director of the UW Innocence Project. He was an attorney for the Civil Rights Division, US Justice Dept as an investigator of civil rights violations in elections.
