Author
“In Just the Right Light is a book of snapshots and alleyways leading us to heartbreak, tough choices and tiny victories. These stories continually challenge and return us to our own shortcomings and a world in need of repair….Together, these stories are a collection of risks. And American prose needs more risks like them.”
—Eric Wasserman, author of Celluloid Strangers and The Temporary Life
“William R. Soldan’s people live with the realities of violence and terrible childhoods, jail and hard living. In story after story, there’s a craftsman’s eye for undiluted heart-crushing detail that can kill you with a simple-sounding sentence, stories in which a hundred bucks might cure everything and heroin addicts and twelve-steppers alike go off-course one last time before foundering in new but not exactly better waters. These stories are rock-solid revelations.” —Rusty Barnes, author of Reckoning and Knuckledragger
“William R. Soldan packs each story in explosives, ‘Like an uncoiled copperhead,’ the surging momentum of his masterful prose penetrates us, then hurls us into the tragic microcosm of life.”
-Meg Tuite, author of Bound by Blue and Meet My Haze
“Soldan is a master craftsman.”
-Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs
“Unflinching and haunting . . . Soldan is the kind of writer we need right now.”
-Robert Vaughan, author of Funhouse and Askew
“Soldan’s characters are thoroughly wrought, so much so that even the most hardscrabble and damaged character becomes someone to root for.”
-Len Kuntz, author of This Is Why I Need You
“In Soldan’s work we find men beaten down by circumstance, women made fierce by necessity, barroom poetics to rival early Waits or Springsteen or Townes van Zandt, and—most surprisingly—a gentleness for these things that most writers only bestow on that which is much softer.”
-Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City and Transmutation
William R. Soldan is an American fiction writer and poet from northeast Ohio whose work has been published in dozens of journals, magazines, and anthologies. He teaches workshops focused on establishing place, developing voice, and exploring hybrid forms.
William R. Soldan 