B. Pladek is a writer and literature scholar based in Milwaukee, WI. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense Fiction, The Offing, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and a 2018 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. His debut novel, DRY LAND, about a young forester who discovers he has a magical ability to grow plants, weaves together explorations of ecology, masculinity, and queerness, all set against a little-known period in US history, the birth of forestry during the first world war, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press (2023, world English). The novel asks how we hurt nature when we place ourselves outside it, and how we hurt ourselves when we believe love is something we must deserve.
He is represented by Brenna English-Loeb.