Steve Pollock

Steve Pollock has taught middle school for twenty-eight years. Twenty-eight years of teenagers, which is its own kind of frontier endurance, and twenty-eight years of watching what happens when a story is told well enough that a room of thirteen-year-olds goes quiet.

He loves Utah history — especially the way it connects to the larger story of the American West. Not the polished version on the monument plaque, but the parts underneath it: the crossings, the settlements that failed, the disasters people stopped naming out loud, the ordinary labor of families who stayed.

The Wooden Sisters is his debut novel. It grew out of family names and real events, and it is told by two carved maple dolls because objects outlast the people who carry them, and because a doll in a wagon sees things nobody wrote down.

He lives in West Jordan with his wife, Teresa Rex, and their naughty cat, Pixie.