Joel Schwartz

An award-winning playwright, screenwriter and travel writer, Joel grew up in New Jersey and went to Harvard College, where he received a degree in Far Eastern Languages and Literatures. While studying Chinese, both Mandarin and classical, he directed a dozen of his plays (and a couple of operas, which he knew nothing about) and received the class award for ‘outstanding creative contribution.’

Joel moved to Manhattan after college and worked in publishing. He also became a member of the New York Zen Society, formalizing his study in zazen. He went on a seven-day sesshīn with Yasutani-roshi the year before the master died.

He received a Shubert Fellowship, which took him to the University of Minnesota where he studied theater and wrote his play Tilt (formerly untilted). After directing a production of it in Minneapolis, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles produced it to great reviews. While holding other jobs, Joel had ten of his plays produced primarily in the west, several with multiple productions.

During the years his plays were produced, Joel held a wide variety of jobs until he became involved with homeless youth in Hollywood, where he worked with teenagers for thirty years. He founded several organizations which housed, educated and counseled teenagers and was co-founder and first Executive Director of Los Angeles Youth Network, now over twenty-five years old and thriving. He has since retired and now serves on the board of the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund.

Joel’s most recent book, A Daoist Journey Into China: journal of a voyage into the interior, was published in 2012 and is the culmination of his last fifty years doing Zen meditation set against a solo trip he took 10,000 miles around China before the country modernized.

Joel retired from (non-literary) work in 2005 to coastal Mendocino County, where he lives with his partner amid redwoods and foghorns, no stranger to rural California life.