An award-winning playwright, screenwriter, travel writer and now novelist, Joel Schwartz has been writing since
he was a boy. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he escaped as soon as he could and pursued a career in playwriting.
After college, he received a Shubert Fellowship to study at the University of Minnesota. A play he wrote while
there, Tilt (formerly untilted), went on to become his first professional production
at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. His subsequent plays were performed primarily in the Western U.S., with
Power Lines: an El Segundo triptych a winner in the 1980 National Gay Playwriting Contest.
He was a screenwriting fellow at the American Film Institute, and among his film work the comic short
Coming On won a Cine Golden Eagle Award.
In addition to Joel’s life as a playwright, he has worked odd jobs from publishing to peddling mystical
oils. Co-founding and serving as first executive director of Los Angeles Youth Network, he has worked with homeless
youth for twenty-five years, helping to craft the federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act and
Safe Choices, a 1980’s HIV care and prevention manual for the United States Department of Health
and Human Services. He was an early advocate for long-term services for street kids, from whom he learned first-hand
about the angst and issues of The Extraordinary Pupfish of Calaveras County.
Joel now lives in coastal Mendocino County, amid redwood trees and foghorns, no stranger to rural California life.
Get the book:
The Extraordinary Pupfish of Calaveras County is the latest offering from author Joel
Schwartz. Set in the rural Gold Rush community of Murphys, California, the story is told from the dual vantage
points of an unwilling 15-year-old hero and an obstinate 65-year-old widow, both grappling with the hypocrisies
of a twisted world.
Get it now through www.iUniverse.com, where the first chapter is available for browsing. Also available from
Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and coming soon to a bookseller
near you. Click here for more information.