Patricia C. Wrede-GOH
Patricia was born on March 27, 1953 in Chicago, Illinois. She is the eldest of five siblings
(four girls and one boy). Currently, she has four nephews and four nieces living in
Alabama, Maine, and Illinois.
Everyone in her family is a voracious reader, and grew up surrounded by books
(pretty much literally–they had bookshelves on nearly every flat wall in the house,
and there were books in the back of the linen cupboard, books in the bathroom
storage shelves behind the cleaning supplies and towels, and books in all the
closets). Among her favorites were the Oz books (she has over thirty of them), the
Narnia Chronicles, and a long list of collections of fairy tales and myths.
Patricia graduated from high school in 1970 and attended Carleton College in Minnesota,
where she earned an A.B. in Biology in 1974. She then moved up the road to
Minneapolis/St. Paul and worked in clerical jobs for a year before returning to school
at the University of Minnesota for her M.B.A.
Patricia married James M. Wrede in 1976, got her M.B.A. in 1977, and started working as a
financial analyst while writing in her spare time. She sold her first novel, Shadow Magic,
in 1980 (it was published two years later, in 1982). In the same year, she became a
founding member of the Interstate Writers’ Workshop, aka the Scribblies, to which she
belonged for five extremely productive years.
By 1985, she was having increasing difficulty in balancing a full-time job in finance with
full-time writing. Something had to give, and with a lot of support from her friends
and family, she chose to quit her day job and write.
Since then, Patricia has made her living as a fiction writer. She and her husband Jim divorced in 1991; She
has no children. She still lives in the suburbs of the Twin Cities with her two cats,
currently Cazaril (a Maine Coon/tabby mix) and Nimue (an elderly medium-hair of
uncertain parentage).
(copied from Patricia C. Wrede’s web site)