William Steele

William Steele is a professor of English at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. He edits "NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture," published by University of Nebraska Press" and co-directs the annual NINE Spring Training Conference hosted in Tempe, Arizona every March.

Steele regularly writes and presents on various aspects of baseball in American literature, music, and history. Both his MA thesis and doctoral dissertation addressed W.P. Kinsella's baseball fiction. It was after reading Steele's first book, "A Member of the Local Nine: Baseball and Identity in the Fiction of W.P. Kinsella," that Kinsella approached him about writing his biography. The request led to over five years of research and writing before "Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella" was published in 2018.