About Joel Schwartz

An award-winning playwright, screenwriter and travel writer, Joel has worked with teenagers for the last twenty-five years. He was a founder and the first executive director of Los Angeles Youth Network, an association of housing and independent living programs for homeless youth, now over twenty years old and thriving.

A Harvard graduate in Asian studies, Joel translated and contrasted the Tao te ching and Ecclesiastes for his senior thesis. He has traveled in Central and South America, through Europe, Africa and Asia, having spent extensive time living in Greece and wandering across India. Just prior to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he wrote a travel memoir, A Taoist Journey Into Modern China, soon to be published.

Living in Mendocino County among redwoods with his partner Jim and their dog Zoë, Joel is now able to devote himself more fully to his writing. He is a Master Gardener, an active volunteer with several local organizations, and he has served on the board of the Mendocino Film Festival. Currently he is working on a new novel.