✍️ Author Spotlight: Richard Scharine

spokemaster1
Jun 27
3 min read

Updated: Jul 1

📸 Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Author — **📸 Photo Credit:** Courtesy of the Author

Quick Reference

💻 Author Hubs: Goodreads Profile | Goodreads Readers Group

📚 Featured Works: The Woman in the Third Floor Front, Harvest, & The Past We Step Into

📚 Focus Genres: Literary Fiction, Historical Short Stories, Political Theatre, & Theatre History

📍 Regional Connection: Northern Utah Community Author / University of Utah Professor Emeritus

About the Author

Born in the back room of a Wisconsin tenant farm, Dr. Richard Scharine went to a one-room grade school and rode a bus 52 miles to high school. After serving in the peacetime army, he married Marilyn Hunt—an event he calls the most important action of his life. Following his graduate studies at the University of Kansas, he spent decades teaching theatre, directing community productions, and leading performance tours across Europe alongside his wife and children.

In 1978, Dr. Scharine joined the University of Utah Theatre Department as a scholar, where he served as Director of Graduate Studies, Head of the B.A. Program, and Interim Chair. Over his storied career, he has written two scholarly books, published dozens of articles, acted in seven foreign countries, and served for 17 years as the artistic director of People Productions, Utah’s first African American theatre company. In 2022, he retired as a highly decorated professor emeritus, having been named Professor of the Year, Diversity Professor of the Year, and College of Fine Arts Excellence Award Winner. Sidelined by cancer in 2020, Dr. Scharine transitioned his creative energy onto the page, launching a prolific second career as a fiction writer.

🏛️ Featured Published Work

The Plays of Edward Bond (1976): Published by Associated University Press in London, this work marked the beginning of his academic writing career and was born from his rewritten dissertation.
From Class to Caste (1991): A comprehensive study of American political theatre from the 1930s through the 1980s, developed from a specialized class he created at the University of Utah.
The Past We Step Into (2021): His debut fiction collection, encapsulating the lives of a young couple loosely based on his wife and himself navigating the shifting landscapes of 20th-century America and three other continents.
Harvest (2023): A Literary Titan award-winning collection that opens with a Wisconsin boy’s first harvest in 1947, tracking Americans in transition through Oregon and Utah, and featuring a vivid recollection of his 2020 cancer-induced hallucinations.
The Woman in the Third Floor Front (2026): A Literary Titan award-winning collection. The title story draws from two personal experiences: the crippling of his legs and an airline shutting down for ten days in a strange city. The other stories were inspired by actual, unbelievable events in Utah, the presence and absence of law and order, and his family’s multi-generational history.

💡 Insider Takeaway: The Present Web of the Past

In 2010, Dr. Scharine had the distinct honor of portraying legendary Utah writer Wallace Stegner onstage in a production composed entirely of Stegner's own writings. When transitioning to short stories, Scharine adopted Stegner's philosophy of restructuring lived experiences into narrative truth: "Break down your life in pieces. Then put it back together in a different form. That way everything you write will be true, but it will still be fiction."

Having spent his adult life teaching theatre history—explaining plays through the exact historical contexts in which they were written and performed—Scharine constructs stories set in a recognizable present, designed to reveal the hidden past events that secretly shape his characters' lives. Guided by the words of his literary mentor, William Faulkner—“The past is not dead. It’s not even past”—Scharine's fiction explores how we all labor inside the intricate webs spun before our birth: webs of heredity, environment, desire, consequence, history, and eternity.