Phyllis Miller Swartz

Before writing YODER SCHOOL Phyllis Miller Swartz taught for thirty years. Her students were in middle schools, gifted education, parent-coaching programs, and prisons, even death row. In her retirement, she continues to teach in a variety of settings—as a college adjunct, in an art museum, in teaching seminars, and on her blog: Apple to Apple.

YODER SCHOOL is her first book. She had meant to write a book earlier. Instead, she went to college, had babies, wrote curriculum, volunteered at church, ran a music camp, served on the library board, and taught thousands of classes. When she retired, she began to think back to the classrooms that formed her. She had, after all, a unique repertoire of schooling. She had gone to class, for example, with the Amish in the mountains of western Maryland, with the city kids in the Rust Belt city of Flint, Michigan, and with the hippies at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

This disparate education, she knew, had influenced her teaching. So she wrote stories of the classrooms that had formed her. And these stories became YODER SCHOOL.

Phyllis Miller Swartz earned a bachelor's degree from Antioch College, a master's degree in Educational Policy and Leadership with a specialization in curriculum development from The Ohio State University, and a certificate in gifted education from Ashland University.

She writes from her century-old house in London, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and waits for her children and grandchildren to visit.