Steven Mayfield was born and raised in Nebraska, a place where people prefer that you think well of them, should you think of them at all. He is a past recipient of the Mari Sandoz Prize for Fiction and the author of over fifty scientific and literary publications. After a short stint as a sketch writer in Los Angeles, he attended medical school at the University of Nebraska followed by post-doctoral training and teaching/research appointments at the University of Iowa, Brown University Program in Medicine, and the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas.
After a hiatus away from creative writing that lasted almost twenty years — during which he published forty-two scientific articles, abstracts, chapters, and reviews — Steven returned to fiction in 1993. In 1994, his stories began to appear in print and have been published by Event, The Black River Review, cold-drill, artisan, The Long Story, and the anthology From Eulogy to Joy. In 1998, he was the guest editor for Cabin Fever, the literary journal of The Cabin Literary Center. He retired from medicine in 2004 and spent several years working as a free-lance editor before publishing Howling at the Moon, a Best Books of 2010 selection by USA Book News as well as an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Treasure of the Blue Whale was published by Regal House in 2020 and was a Benjamin Franklin Silver Medalist, a Nautilus Award Silver Medalist, and one of Shelf Unbound’s 100 Notables of 2020. It was a Finalist for a Foreword Indies Award, the National Indie Excellence Award, the Book Excellence Award, and an Eric Hoffer Award, as well as a Semi-Finalist for the Chanticleer Mark Twain Award.
Steven believes that a writer should keep readers firmly attached to the narrator’s hip and not waste their time, that it’s possible to forward a serious point without making the reader feel wretched, and that the simple declarative sentence is often more elegant than a florid metaphor. He also believes that dogs are superior to humans because their only real goal is to be good, that baseball is the best game in the world, and that coffee and donuts are absolute proof that a superior intelligence oversees the universe.
Steven currently resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Pam, and a pair of dogs who can be annoyingly insistent around meal-time. He and Pam share five grown children. He can order beer in four languages. His wife can say, “Pay no attention to this man” in five.
Steven’s second book in the Regal House canon, Delphic Oracle U.S.A., will be published in the fall of 2022.
