Katrin Schumann |
"I was born in Germany, but grew up in Brooklyn and London. As a child, I loved listening to my family’s stories—of war and death and love gone wrong—and later I would rewrite them in my head, filling in the details, the motives, and making up new endings. Soon I started writing my stories down and I’ve never stopped.
At some level, family and community is what all my work is about. Everywhere I look there are stories to tell. In my professional life as a writer, editor, and teacher, I work with stories across various genres. My most recent book, The Secret Power of Middle Children (Hudson St/Penguin), is the first nonfiction exploration of the benefits of being stuck in the middle. My current works-in-progress include a book on parenting strategies that can make or break children born into wealth, and a novel about forbidden love and a family torn apart by the division of Germany at the end of WWII. To read an excerpt, click here.
My work has been featured multiple times on the TODAY show and in Woman’s Day, The Times (UK) and on NPR, as well as other national and international media. Early in my career, I was granted the Kogan Media Award for my work at National Public Radio, and as a student, I received academic scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities. More recently I’ve been awarded writing residencies at the VCCA, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and Vermont Studio Center. I live near Boston with my husband and three teenagers, and frequently return to Europe to gather more family stories."