Pat Schneider - Home page

Plans are exploding like Roman candles for book launches and parties celebrating the release by Oxford University Press of my new book. It can be pre-ordered now from Amazon or Borders, and is scheduled to be in bookstores and on Amazon.com by March 1. Beginning in April there will be book launches, celebrations, readings, half-day workshops and a couple of my usual five-day intensive workshops. On Friday, April 5 there will be a big shebang in Amherst -- an east coast launch the book, and a west coast launch and party in Berkeley on Saturday, April 27, co-sponsored by Pacific School of Religion and Amherst Writers West. Plans are also underway for an events in New York City, four cities in North Carolina, and possibly in Ontario.

After seven years of writing the book, another year of hoping for acceptance by Oxford, then a ninth year of working with editors, proof readers and indexer, I am convinced that this is the best work I have ever done. And I did not do it alone. I am deeply grateful to all of you who have supported me in the writing and in these past two years of near solitude as the final i’s were dotted and t’s crossed.

Please check upcoming events on my website calendar. I do hope to see you in the new year.

"Pat Schneider is a fuse lighter. Her work is gentle, playful, brilliant, and revolutionary. She is the real animal."

~ Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write and The Artist's Way

"The wisest teacher of writing I know."

~ Peter Elbow, from the Foreword to Writing Alone and With Others

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 Keillor 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.

Party Time!! The Book Is Done!

Pat's New Book From Oxford

Find out more.

Or Buy It Now.

Listen to Pat’s Poems and one by Peter on Writer’s Almanac

Signed Broadside