Steven Verrier has worn many hats in life, but he’s not afraid to show how little hair he has left on top. With graduate degrees from Columbia and the University of Iowa, he’s worked as a high school teacher and a college instructor, an editor and a musician, a laborer and group home attendant, and plenty more. He’s never been a stuntman or a human cannonball, but he’s not finished yet. Having lived overseas for many years before returning to the United States, he’s well acquainted, through his own experience in an international marriage and the experience of others, with the immigration bureaucracy described and lambasted in Tough Love, Tender Heart. A second novel, Plan B, draws on his many observations in US public schools and, like Tough Love, Tender Heart, is sure to hold readers spellbound from start to finish. His nonfiction Class Struggle: Journal of a Teacher In up to His Ears picks up where Plan B leaves off and takes those observations to an altogether different level.
More recently, he's the author of Professional Wrestling in the Pacific Northwest: A History, 1883 to the Present, published in late 2017 by McFarland & Company. In early 2019 he followed up with a second wrestling book for McFarland—an in-depth biography of "Canada's Greatest Athlete," Gene Kiniski. More recent books, both published in 2022, are George Gordienko: Canadian Wrestler, Artist and Renaissance Man and The Two-Party Trap: Recipe for Dysfunction in American Politics—the latter, a compelling, comprehensive, surprisingly concise narrative tracing how American democracy has taken so many wrong turns over the course of 230-plus years since electors unanimously handed the presidency to George Washington. Two more books—Roots Revisited: A Hometown Study and Wilbur Snyder: The World's Most Scientific Wrestler, both cowritten—were released in mid-2025.
