BIOGRAPHY

Patricia Roth Schwartz was born in Charleston, WV, on Columbus Day in 1946. She has also lived in Southern California and New England: Hartford CT for fifteen years and Boston for ten. Schwartz holds a BA in English composition from Mount Holyoke College, an MA in English literature from Trinity College (CT), and a MA in counseling psychology from Antioch/New England Graduate School. She currently resides in Waterloo, in the Finger Lakes Region of Central NY, where she moved in 1991, with her partner, Sandy Zohari, and their standard poodle, Rory, on their thirty-five acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven, where she writes poems, plays, and fiction, cultivates herbs, maintains perennial and rock gardens, and feeds the birds. She has taken early retirement from part-time community college teaching in NY, and (previously in New England), the full-time practice of holistic psychotherapy. Now she focuses on writing, herbalism, cooking, artwork, photography, hiking, biking, and kayaking, travel, and literary projects/publishing, as well as her weekly volunteer work in Auburn Correctional Facility where she facilitates a poetry workshop with inmates.

Teaching:  Pat conducts workshops for The Writers & Books Literary Center, Inc., in Rochester, and many other organizations, including Waterloo Library & Historical Society, Geneva Public Library and The Phelps Arts Center. She often conducts workshops for writers' groups funded by Poets & Writers, Inc. She founded and volunteers as the sole facilitator for the Poetry Workshop in Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security men's prison in Auburn, NY, which has been meeting since summer 2001. Previously Schwartz worked part-time in the Inmate Higher Education Program (IHEP) at Cayuga Correctional Facility in Moravia NY, teaching college classes, until the program was cut by the state of New York. In June of 2008 she was designated "Volunteer of the Year" at Auburn Correctional.
She has edited and had published four books by inmate poets which are listed below and offered for sale under My Books.

Published in Journals: Her work has been published in Olive Trees, The Lyric, Sojourner, Plainswoman, The Beloit Fiction Journal, The Creative Woman, Backbone, The Distillery, Blueline, Confrontation, Confluence, Phantasmagoria, Exit-On Line, The Women's Review of Books, Nimrod, Clackamas Literary Review, Litchfield Review, Lullwater Review, Iron Horse, Friendly Women: a Quaker Journal, Pinnacle Hill Review, South Carolina Review, Cape Rock, Square Lake, Gargoyle, Le Mot Juste, Sow's Ear, Madison Review, Palo Alto Review, HeartLodge, Ellipsis, Sea Stories, The Canadian Arachnologist, Off the Coast, Chaffin, and Clare.

Published in Anthologies: Her poems have also appeared in the following anthologies: Rochester Poets for Peace 2000; Summer Songs; In a Mirror: Women on Women; Common Intuitions: Poems on Women; In the Arms of Words: Poets for Disaster Relief; and The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets Write on Endangered Species. Schwartz was selected as a Finalist for the Willamette Poetry Award from Clackamas for the 2004 Fall/Winter Issue, and as a Finalist in both the Sow's Ear 2004 Poetry Contest and Rochester's ImageOut poetry contests for 2002 and 2003. She received 2nd place in Heart Lodge's 2006 contest.

Readings:  Pat appears frequently in reading series, at coffeehouses, bookstores, festivals, and other venues. She has been featured twice in the Genesee Reading Series in Rochester. She founded and co-coordinated a Summer Poetry Festival for The Gell Center of Writers & Books in Bristol, NY, held for three years, plus a poetry reading series at Fairport Coffee House, Fairport, NY. In March 2008, she was one of five NY state women poets selected to read from their own work in conjunction with pieces by women composers presented during the "Women in Music Festival" at The Eastman School of Music in Rochester. In 2010 Pat was awarded a grant from the NY State Council on the Arts as an Individual Artist to offer five performances of her work in various venues in the Finger Lakes region. She has read twice for the "Authors Aloud" series at The Little Theater Cafe in Rochester.

Book-Length Publications:  Her first volume of poetry, Hungers, was published in 1979 by The Blue Spruce Press, a collective of four women poets from the greater Hartford area in CT. Her volume of short fiction, The Names of the Moons of Mars, was published in 1989 by New Victoria Publishers and won a Lambda Literary Award.

Her next full-length collection, Planting Bulbs in a Time of War, and Other Poems was published in 2005, her chapbook, Down the Middle with a Nickel: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood in 2007. A sequel to ...Nickel, The La Brea Tar Pits Blues: a Memoir of a Los Angeles Adolescence in Poems and Short Lyric Prose, appeared in 2010. All these books are published by Foothills Publishing. In 2011, Blue Heron Publishing, an imprint of The Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes, a grass-roots organization founded by Pat and poet/publisher Steve Tills, came out with her volume, The Loneliness of Squash: poems, prose poems and short lyric prose.

Her long-awaited full-length volume, The Crows of Copper John: a History of Auburn Prison in Poems, was released in late 2012 by Olive Trees.

Pat has also served as editor for four volumes of poems by inmates:

Guerillas in the Mist, and Other Poems, by Michael Rhynes, 2007; "I'm a Lyrical Brother, and I Can Feel It in My Bones," an anthology from the Inmates' Poetry Workshop at Auburn Correctional Facility, 2010, both chapbooks; a full-length anthology, Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind: an Anthology of Inmates' Poems from Auburn Correctional Facility, Auburn, NY, 2001-2010, co-edited by John Roche. In 2012, another full-length book, Exiting the Prism-- Fade to Black..., by Jalil Muntaqim, currently in Attica, was issued. all these volumes are from Olive Trees Publishing, except Doing Time... which is from FootHills.

Theatre Performances:  Her one-act play, "Weeding for Isabelle," based on her own family history, was given a staged reading through the Plays-In-Progress program of greater Rochester in June of 2008, and has been given several other staged readings since in Waterloo. Her ten-minute plays, "Odd Socks," "Max Jail, Monday Nights," and "Muffinland," have been performed as staged readings in Waterloo and in Phelps. The performers have come from a group Pat started, The Sage-Thyme Players.

A readers' theater version of her full-length volume of poems, The Crows of Copper John: a History of Auburn Prison in Poems, has been performed twice: once at The Downstairs Caberet in Rochester and once at Auburn Public Theater.