About Tim Wheat

Tim Wheat grew up outside Manito, Illinois, where he attended Midwest Central High School and developed lifelong interests in athletics, music, history, and storytelling. He later studied Secondary Education at Bradley University while continuing his baseball career as a pitcher.

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Music was part of Tim’s life from an early age, inherited from parents who taught him to appreciate the power of a great song. During his twenties, he spent years writing, recording, producing, performing, and touring. His bands opened for majaro label acts including Megadeth, Lamb of God, Hatebreed, and Zakk Wylde/Black Label soceity. Since then, he has written more than eighty original songs across multiple full-length albums, exploring everything from heavy metal and hard rock to acoustic music, Americana, dance/trance...funk...country...anything that's ever made him sit back and say "That's interesting and it moves me in some sort of way...I think I'll take a stab at it."

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Tim’s path into literature began with song lyrics and poetry before expanding into articles, scripts, historical fiction, and novels. He served as a ghostwriter on the autobiography A Soldier’s Fortune, wrote animated scripts, and published his first novel in 2013. His books include Rex Chase: A Novel, The Sentinel: A Rex Chase Novel, and Patriot TIDE: A Wallace Marin Novel. During his years as an educator, he also worked with his eighth-grade Advanced Social Studies students to create three historical-fiction novels, using storytelling to bring the past to life.

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Whether working through music or prose, Tim is drawn to stories about endurance, family, history, sacrifice, mystery, and the forces that shape ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. His work moves freely between the deeply personal and the larger-than-life, but it always begins with the same goal: to create something worth experiencing.

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Tim lives in East Peoria, Illinois, with his wife and is the proud father of two sons.