Pat is a poet, playwright, librettist, and author of ten books of poetry and non-fiction.  She was born in the Ozark mountains of Missouri where she became intimate with fossils, creekbeds, grasshoppers and box turtles. After a search for work took her single mother to St. Louis, from age ten Pat lived in tenements and in an orphanage until she was given a scholarship to college.  Those early experiences have deeply influenced her writing, and fueled her passion for those who have been denied voice through poverty and other misfortunes.

Pat’s libretto, "The Lament of Michal," was performed in Carnegie Hall by Phyllis Bryn Julson and the Atlanta Symphony directed by Robert Shaw. Her poetry has  been read by Garrison Kiellor on National Public Radio’s Writer’s Almanac sixteen times. (Poems are hidden under the seasonal pictures above --just click on them.) There are more than three hundred recorded productions of her plays for community theater.  A film about her work with women in low-income housing, "Tell Me Something I Can’t Forget," by Florentine Films/Hott Productions has won national and international top awards for documentary films.

Amherst Writers & Artists, founded by Pat in 1981 and directed and managed by Pat and Peter for thirty years, is now an international network of workshop leaders who use the writing method described in Pat’s book, Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press.

Pat's newest book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.