[1] He later attended Syracuse University,[2] where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.

[3][4] He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University.

Olmstead is the author of the novels America by Land, A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go, Soft Water, Far Bright Star and Coal Black Horse.

He is also the author of a memoir Stay Here With Me, as well as River Dogs, a collection of short stories, and the textbook Elements of the Writing Craft.

[3] One reviewer praised Olmstead's ability to "translate nature's revelatory beauty into words", commenting that Coal Black Horse evokes what Henry David Thoreau described in Walden as "the indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature"; by contrast, the Mexican desert of Far Bright Star is "the place of the sun shriveled and the dried up".