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Patricia Schultheis

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Patricia began writing late in the '70s, in her mid-thirties, when she started submitting op-ed essays to the now-defunct Baltimore Evening Sun. Some of those pieces dealt with topical issues, but many were about matters of the heart. And, although she didn't realize it at the time, the intimate, contemplative tone of those pieces would inform her later fiction.

But in those early days, while holding down a variety of public relations positions and raising her family, she was more interested in journalism and began submitting freelance news articles to whichever publication would accept them. Her focus on journalism continued until her mid-fifties, when a series of unexpected deaths in her family prompted her to reassess the direction of her energies. Subsequently, she turned from journalism to essays and fiction. On the strength of the fourth story she had ever written, which appeared in The Distillery, she was accepted to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference 1999. Her experience at Bread Loaf confirmed her decision to focus on fiction along with essays and book reviews.

Since then, she has had three books published: a pictorial local history, Baltimore's Lexington Market published by Arcadia Publishing (2007); a short story collection entitled St. Bart's Way, published by Washington Writers Publishing House in 2015; and a memoir, A Balanced Life, published by All Things That Matter Press in 2018. She has forty-some short stories published in national and international literary journals and won awards from the Soul-Making Literary Competition sponsored by the League of American Pen Women, Washington Writers Publishing House, the Fitzgerald Literary Competition, and Winning Writers in 2013. In addition, she has been a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Snake Nation Press Award, the Iowa Review Fiction Award, the Halifax Ranch Fiction Award, the Willow Spring Editions Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, the Mary Mackey Short Story Prize, and many others.

Twice, she has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and served on the editorial boards of The Baltimore Review and Narrative. She is also a voting member of The National Book Critics Circle and has had stories anthologized in City Sages, Lock and Load, What America Looks Like, and America’s Future. She has taught at Prince George's, Howard, and Baltimore County community colleges in Maryland as well as at McDaniel College and in the Odyssey Program of Johns Hopkins University. She holds two graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and an undergraduate degree from Albertus Magnus College. A widow and the mother of two grown sons, Patricia lives in Baltimore.

Website: https://www.pschultheis.net/