About Me

Half-Lives, Lynn Schmeidler’s collection of short stories was selected by Matt Ball as the winner of the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction and will be published in Spring 2024.

Her story, “InventEd” was selected by Jonathan Lethem as the winner of BOMB’s 2023 Fiction Contest.

Her poetry collection, History of Gone (Veliz Books, 2018) is inspired by the life and unsolved disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett, a once-famous child prodigy writer who disappeared at the age of 25 in 1939. Described as “…a cautionary tale of the erasures of domesticity, a vocational fable, an inside-out bildungsroman…,” the poems in the book address issues of genius and effacement; childhood and feminism; love and history.

Her chapbook, Wrack Lines (Grayson Books, 2017) conjures a world of infatuation, unrequited love, idealization, longing, projection and lust. Together the poems offer “a feminist handbook of one-sided yearning.”

Her chapbook, Curiouser & Curiouser explores selfhood and identity through the lens of rare neurological disorders. These poems “evoke the alternately offbeat, poignant, droll and terrifying circumstances of people whose perceptions are irrevocably askew.” Curiouser & Curiouser won the 2013 Grayson Books Chapbook Contest.

Her short fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Awl, Boston Review, Conjunctions, KROnline, Los Angeles Review, Georgia Review and The Southern Review as well as in numerous anthologies including Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press) and Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books).

Lynn’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been listed under Other Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction and has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts

Lynn has led writing workshops at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, The Writers Studio, libraries and schools. She is a college essay coach and is available for manuscript consultations (schedule permitting) upon request.

Educated at Yale University, Lynn works and lives in the NY Hudson Valley.