After his acclaimed first novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, Machart won the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Prize for fiction, the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Reading the West Prize, and was named a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice". With his Faulkner-esque writing, Machart explores the connections between family, landscape, remembrance, and salvation. He is currently a professor at Bridgewater State University. Dirty realist. 
 

"The townsfolk would assume, from this day forward, that Klara's death had turned a gentle man bitter and hard, but the truth, Vaclav knew, was that her absence only rendered him, again, the man he'd been before he'd met her, one only her proximity had ever softened."

– Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness