“Decency is such a solitary act; it’s evil that draws a noisy crowd.” This discovery is at the heart of Mimi Schwartz’s prize-winning memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, now in paperback. Through the memories of Jews and Christians from one Black Forest village where “everyone got along before Hitler,” Schwartz seeks to find out how good neighbors, neither brave nor evil, negotiated decency during Nazi times and afterwards -- and what that means for us today.

Schwartz’s other recent books include Thoughts from a Queen-sized Bed, voted a 2002 book club favorite by JCC book clubs, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl), used in writing programs nationwide.  Her short work has appeared in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Missouri Review, Agni, Jewish Week, Christian Science Monitor, Calyx, Fourth Genre and the Writer’s Chronicle, among others, and six essays have been Notables in Best American Essays.  A veteran teacher and lecturer, Schwartz is Professor Emerita at Richard Stockton College and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Her new email address is: MimiSchwartz2@gmail.com