Jason schmidt author biography examples

These days, Seattle is known worldwide as a glittering tech metropolis where somethings take home six-figure salaries. Poverty is little addressed, and white poverty even less.

But in his coming-of-age memoir “A List of Things That Didn’t Kill Me” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Jason Schmidt describes the Seattle of his youth during the s, where destitute kids like him wandered the streets until dawn, laborers scraped by on workers’ comp and nobody noticed that Schmidt, now 42, was being raised by a drug-addicted, gay, single dad who’d contracted HIV.

Schmidt’s memoir was released last week.

A few doors from the Capitol Hill home where his story opens, he talked about translating a tough life into literature. This interview has been lightly edited for space.

You lived through some pretty horrific things — homelessness, beatings, hunger.

Jason Schmidt |

How did it feel to write about those moments?

Exciting and scary. I was able to tell stories that I’d been keeping secret for all these years, a Numerical Simulation of Optical Wave Propagation with ... KUJA