Voting rights attorney tells a tale of dark money chicanery in 'The Coyotes of Carthage'

Published: Oct. 7, 2020, 4:23 p.m.

Steven Wright spent six years at the Department of Justice Voting Section witnessing all manner of election chicanery, voter suppression and dark money campaigns. So when he turned his efforts towards fiction, he decided to write what he knew. The result was The Coyotes of Carthage, a literary novel following Toussaint Andre Ross, a Black political consultant sent from his Washington, D.C., agency in disgrace to run a dark money campaign and convince a small town in South Carolina to sell their land to mining interests. The personal, moral and ethical choices that are made could save his career–or set him adrift entirely. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Wright tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles how he made the leap to creative writing, what it's been like to teach students at the University of Wisconsin Law School remotely, and the plans to turn The Coyotes of Carthage into a TV series.