Vernon Schmid

Vernon Schmid was born in Kansas in 1934. A prize-winning poet and editor, he is author of over two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, the latest of which are Collected Poems, Radical Implications, Buzzard Tales, Kansas, Watie's Wolves, Cherokee Myth and Legend, Otium Sanctum: Poems for the Journey Toward, Westering: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2004, Houlihans and Horse Sense, Showdown at Chalk Creek, Kissing Moctezuma's Serpent, Seven Days of the Dog, and Hog Killers and Other Poems. Amazon Shorts published his ten part western serial Rags, the short story "Last Letter from Bitter," and the nonfiction "Cherokee Mounted Rifles Muster Roll." He has been a horse trainer, Rocky Mountain trail guide, ranch hand, rough stock rodeo competitor, journalist, radio broadcaster, community action agency administrator, pastor and university chaplain. As a journalist he reported on conflicts in Mexico, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Northern Ireland. Some two thousand of his articles, essays, book reviews, and poems have appeared in nearly one hundred periodicals. With degrees in journalism, theology, law, and creative writing, he has been an adjunct professor at Cecil College, Fort Lewis College, Chesapeake College, and Penn Valley Community College and a guest speaker/lecturer at community events, service organizations, churches, colleges, and universities in California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Delaware. He has received an Associated Church Press Award for the editorship of the United Methodist Reporter for Eastern Pennsylvania and a Western Writers of America President's Award for his contribution to the organization. His published work is collected at Drew University and Labette Community College. He and his wife, Susan, live in Maryland and enjoy time with their daughters and Maxx, their Shih Tzu. Not necessarily in that order.