Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at the SUNY New Paltz Department of English. She taught autobiography; creative writing; and American, contemp-orary, women’s, and Holocaust literature. She also taught writing at Life Spring Institute in Saugerties, NY.
Her work is published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Memoir (and), The Orchards Poetry Journal, Westchester Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry is Pushcart-nominated and anthologized in An Apple in Her Hand (Codhill Press) and Rethinking the Ground Rules (Mediacs Books). Jan is a frequent reader of her poetry at venues in the Hudson Valley.
Her volumes include We Speak in Tongues (Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), She had this memory (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), The Earth Was Still (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time (Word Temple Press), Foraging for Light (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini (Palooka Press, 2021). Her latest, coauthored with Tana Miller, is Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows (Kelsay Books, 2024).
She also has two autobiographical essay collections: Women/ Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life, coauthored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge, 2000). With Laurence Carr, she co-authored an anthology of women’s writing from the Hudson Valley: A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill, 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for an anthology.
Paperback: 126 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (August 21, 2026)