Currently a visiting professor for the low-residency MFA in creative writing at Western Colorado University and co-founder and director of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, Rick Wilber has penned more than fifty science-fiction short stories, several college textbooks, including Magazine Feature Writing (1994), The Writer’s Handbook for Editing & Revision (1996), Modern Media Writing (2002 with Randy Miller), and Media Matters (2017). Among his acclaimed novels are The Cold Road (2003), Rum Point (2009), and the S’hudonni series [Alien Morning (2016) and Alien Day (2021)]. Wilber’s story “Something Real” won the 2013 Sidewise Award. His short fiction has been collected in Where Garagiola Waits and Other Baseball Stories (1999), To Leuchars (2000), The Moe Berg Episodes (2018), Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination (2020), and The Wandering Warriors (2020 with Alan Smale).

Wilber edited the five anthologies Subtropical Speculations: Anthology of Florida Science Fiction (1991 with Richard Mathews), FUTURE MEDIA (2011), Field Of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of The Strange and Supernatural (2014), and Making History: Classic Alternate History Stories (2019). His book length memoir about his dad, baseball player Del Wilber, My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball (2007) garnered notices from a diversity of people including Peter Golenbock, Peter Straub, and Bill Plaschke.

All of us at Tachyon wish Rick a happy birthday! Hope you get a hit! It is your birthday after all.