Description:
Spring Mills, to be literal about it, is a small town in rural, central Pennsylvania where my father grew up. More than that, for me it evokes a simpler time-when I was a child, for one thing. This poetry collection mirrors that life.
Brief description: Mike Schneider began writing during the Vietnam War when, while serving at an air force base in Ohio, he published an anti-war "underground" newspaper. He has practiced law, worked as a science writer, won awards for magazine writing, and written book reviews and essays on culture for several publications. Three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his poems appear in many literary journals, several anthologies and three chapbooks. He received the 2012 Editors' Award from The Florida Review and the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press. With a colleague in 2010, he founded East End Poets, a group of Pittsburgh-based writers who meet to share their work. In 2017, for the Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie Mellon University, he taught the first course on Bob Dylan in Pittsburgh. Recently, the Hungry Hill Writing Group in West Cork, Ireland, awarded Schneider's work second prize in its Poets Meet Politics 2022 International Open. He lives in Pittsburgh's historic South Side neighborhood.
Review Quotes:
Mike Schneider wields impressive craft and achieves many moments of beauty in Spring Mills. His poems poignantly explore the relationship of a son to his real and archetypal "old man," chronicle experience in a small nation undergoing revolutionary change (Nicaragua), and illuminate the arc of intimacy in romantic life. Schneider writes with exceptional grace about music, leading readers to share his joy in appreciation of, among others, stark fiddle tunes, the "raggedy piano" of an old-time hymn-singing session, and a Brahms sextet.
- TJ Beitelman, author of This Is the Story of His Life
On reading Mike Schneider's Spring Mills, I can't get past one word - it's all I can say, and it's enough. Wonderful.
- Arlene Weiner, author of More