Pat grew up in Dundee, Illinois, a small river town northwest of Chicago. Her father was the principal of her grade school and her mother was a kindergarten teacher. She often helped her dad at school on Saturdays, stapling papers printed on the purple-inked stinky mimeograph machine. She was paid with grape Fanta from the forbidden faculty lounge and Dilly bars from the Dairy Queen. Pat and her two younger brothers were the guinea pigs for her mom’s many kindergarten projects. She’s fingerpainted and danced the Hokey Pokey so many times that she probably has the equivalent of a graduate degree in kindergarten.

Pat is a graduate of St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota. She has worked for many years as a medical social worker, but her first love has always been reading and writing. She has received a Loft McKnight Honorable Mention for her fiction and was a Loft Mentor Finalist.

Pat lives in Minneapolis by the Mississippi River with her husband, artist Brad Kaspari. (who, it must be said, never went to kindergarten).  Her first novel, Rodeo Snow, was inspired by her son Jamie’s love of street skating. Her second, yet to be published, book, Glimmer, is based on her daughter Rachel’s theater tech experience. She is currently at work on a third novel but, as she only has two children, what this one’s about is wide open.