Mimi Schwartz is an award-winning, socially conscious American author, educator, and public speaker. Her most recent book, Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited, was published in March 2021 by University of Nebraska Press [order here]. Other books include When History Is Personal (2018); Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village (2008); Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (2002); and the ever-popular Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, co-authored with Sondra Perl (2006). Her short work has appeared in Ploughshares, Agni, Creative Nonfiction, The Writer’s Chronicle, Boston Globe, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The New York Times, Ninth Letter and The Missouri Review, among others. A recipient of a Foreword Book of the Year Award in Memoir, the Florida Review Editor’s Prize, and the New Hampshire Outstanding Literary Nonfiction Award, Schwartz’s essays have been widely anthologized—and ten have been Notables in the Best American Essays Series. A MacDowell Fellow, A Geraldine R. Dodge Fellow and Professor Emerita in writing at Richard Stockton University, Schwartz gives talks, readings, and creative writing workshops nationwide and abroad.
As a faculty member and then coordinator of Stockton’s writing program (1980-2007), Schwartz became one of the pioneers in the teaching of creative nonfiction. Her craft books include Writing True; Writing Craft, Teacher’s Art; and Writing for Many Roles, as well as five grass-roots anthologies by and for marginalized voices, Her juried talks about writing process have been regularly featured in Associated Writing Program Conferences, Nonfiction Now Conferences, and College Composition and Communication Conferences. Her academic articles on writing have appeared in College English, Chronicles of Higher Education, College Composition and Communication, ASSAY, English Journal, TriQuarterly, Arts & Letters, The Writer, among others.
Schwartz is also a member of OnStage Seniors, a documentary theater ensemble that explores creative nonfiction on stage in the form of documentary theater. Under the auspices of the Center for Modern Aging, the group gathers local true stories from the community—each year on a different theme—and performs them, as monologues and scenes, in theaters, libraries, prisons, senior centers, schools and hospitals in central New Jersey.