Pat Schneider was born in the Ozark mountains of Missouri where she became intimate with fossils, creek bed 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 deeply influenced her writing, and fueled her passion for those who have been denied voice through poverty and other
misfortunes.

Pat's books, poetry, plays, and libretti have been praised by the most prestigious publications and authors in America: The New York Times, the Library Journal, the Atlanta Journal, Small Press Magazine, St. Louis Dispatch, the North Dakota Review, Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, the North Dakota Quarterly, the Kentucky Monthly, the Bellingham Review, the Louisville Times, and many others.

Peter Elbow said that Pat Schneider is "the wisest teacher of writing I know." Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write and The Artist's Way, noted that Pat is "a fuse lighter. Her work is gentle, playful, brilliant, and revolutionary" and Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction, notes that Pat's work is "heartening and practical, a rich variety . . . that celebrates both difference and difficulty as the gifts they are.