Bill Sampson
Author, Attorney
Bill Sampson received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Kansas before serving four years active duty as a Navy Judge Advocate.
Returning to the Midwest, he enjoyed a successful career in the courtroom, achieving partnership at two prestigious law firms. He shared his skills in the classroom as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Kansas School of Law and a Seminar Instructor in the KU Honors Program.
Bill retired from the legal profession in December of 2021. He lives in Lawrence with his wife, Dru. Their three children and seven grandchildren live in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Moscow, Idaho. Wheat Fields is his first novel.
Farieh
Farieh Bukhari’s freshman year at the University of Kansas was the success everyone assumed for her after she tested out of her entire undergraduate math degree in a single fall afternoon. Speaking multiple languages and moving effortlessly between classes in petroleum engineering and English literature, Farieh was the darling of the University Honors Program.
During a summer visit to her home in Tehran, Farieh is excited to reunite with Mehri, her best friend, who had stayed in Iran for college. But when the violence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard chases a terrified Farieh out of her parents’ house, she flees back across the Atlantic Ocean.
Farieh meets Steven soon after her return to school. Handsome, charming, and older, Steven sweeps the vulnerable sophomore off her feet. But as his attentions to her become less frequent they become darker, and Farieh must confront staying in a relationship no longer healthy.
Farieh misplaces her powerful internal voice over the winter. But she finds it in the spring and uses it to confront a reactionary Kansas Legislature. The injury she suffers while leading a student protest makes her an international sensation. Again, she must choose: the thousands of students enraged over her injury, or a resolution that honors truth and peace.
Navigating personal relationships at once captivating and precarious, struggling to hold onto her agency after violence and betrayal and death, Farieh Bukhari lives her sophomore year like we would want her to live it if she were our sister, or our friend.
Creatively imagined and beautifully written, Bill Sampson’s novel, Farieh, is fiction at its very best.
-- Bill Tuttle, Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of several books, including Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children and Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919
Bill Sampson’s compelling second novel, Farieh, follows the inspiring journey of a brilliant Iranian student as she navigates the complexities of America’s collegiate heartland, leading to a quest of self-discovery while attempting to make a difference in the lives of her fellow students. Highly recommend!
-- Thomas L. Carmody, President, Prairie Fire Entertainment
Wheat Fields
...an alluring story of unexpected love and clashing cultures set in America’s rural heartland, Lawrence, Kansas, home of Kansas University and its celebrated NCAA Champion Jayhawk basketball team.
Richie Armstrong moves with his mother from Salina, Kansas, to Lawrence at the start of his senior year of high school. An exceptional shooting guard, he is briefly chronicled by Sean Grogan, the sports editor of the Lawrence Journal World, while at Free State High and then extensively during his freshman year on KU’s basketball team.
Farieh Bukhari, a brilliant and beautiful student who comes to Kansas from Tehran, tests out of her mathematics major as a first-semester freshman and encounters Richie at Wheatfields, the artisan bakery where she works. Later that semester, Farieh testifies in the academic hearing where a super-star philosophy professor—defended by his friend on the law school faculty, Andrew Stevenson—answers charges he is a racist who lost control of his classroom when confronted by one of his students, a confrontation set up by his jealous department head. Richie becomes infatuated with Farieh on meeting her at Thanksgiving, Farieh’s feelings for Richie grow during their spring semester, and the novel closes as the two of them struggle to say “Goodbye” for the summer.
Ardent fans of KU's basketball prowess will love Bill Sampson's new novel. But Wheat Fields is more than a compelling sports story. Sampson's novel also explores such perennial on-campus topics as student romance and academic jealousy, including a colleague's desire for revenge against one of the university's most popular professors.
-- Bill Tuttle, Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Kansas
Wheat Fields is a wonderful book filled with engaging characters brought to life by witty, literate, but accessible and engaging prose. And while there are so many reasons to love this book, as a lawyer, I was simply blown away by Bill’s description of the academic proceeding where a charismatic and talented professor is forced to defend himself against charges of misconduct.
-- Walt Cofer, formerly with Shook, Hardy & Bacon and one of the nation’s premier trial lawyers