STEVEN L. PECK
An evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University, STEVEN L. PECK teaches the philosophy of biology. His scientific work has appeared in American Naturalist Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values, and Biology & Philosophy. Steven also co-edited a volume on environmental stewardship. His creative works include the novel The Gift of the King’s Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications). His poetry has appeared in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum, Red Rock Review, and other magazines. Peck was nominated for the 2011 Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Other awards include the Meyhew Short Story Contest, First Place at Warp and Weave, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Brookie and D.K. Brown Fiction Contest, and second place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest. Peck is a graduate of Moab’s Grand County High School. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
THE SCHOLAR OF MOAB
A Novel
Young Hyrum Thayne, an unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the good people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon thugs, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. To make matters worse, Hyrum’s illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, results in the delivery of a bouncing baby boy who vanishes the night of his birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of the murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical?
“Steven Peck is a gift to the literary world, and The Scholar of Moab is a delight to all the senses and to the imagination.”
—MARGARET BLAIR YOUNG, author of Standing on the Promises