# Lawrence M. Schoen

Lawrence M. Schoen (born July 27, 1959) is an American author, publisher, psychologist, hypnotist, and expert in the Klingon language.

## Biography

Schoen was born in Chicago, Illinois, but his family moved to Southern California when he was 18 months old, and he grew up in Culver City.
In 1983, he graduated with B.S. in psycholinguistics from California State University, Northridge, having designed his own major, and then moved on to Kansas State University where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in psychology. In graduate school, Schoen's research focused on cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.
Doctorate in hand, he spent the next ten years in academia as an assistant professor at New College of Florida, Lake Forest College in Illinois, and Chestnut Hill College in Pennsylvania. He then moved to the private sector and served for about 17 years as the director of research and analytics for a medical center which provides mental health and addiction treatment service works throughout Philadelphia.
In August 2019, Schoen was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and began treatment. The following January, he underwent an autologous bone marrow transplant and entered a new regimen of chemotherapy. As of February 2021, he was in remission.
Schoen lives in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.

## Author

Schoen attended the 1998 session of James E. Gunn's two-week Writers' Workshop in Science Fiction on the campus of the University of Kansas. In 2010, he participated in Walter Jon Williams' two-week master class, the Taos Toolbox.
He has been nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, the Nebula Award for Best Novella three times, as well as receiving nominations for both the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Cóyotl Award for Best Novel.
Some of his more notable works as an author include the Amazing Conroy series of science fiction stories and novels, the first of which appeared in 2001, about a space-traveling stage hypnotist and his alien companion animal (a "buffalito") that can consume anything and farts oxygen. Among these, the short story "Yesterday's Taste" and the novellas Barry's Tale (2012), Trial of the Century (2013), and Calendrical Regression (2015) have received award nominations.
Schoen appeared at Book Expo America in May 2015, where he was presented as one of four authors described by Tor Books as the next generation of science fiction and fantasy, based on his novel Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard, anthropomorphic SF that explores prophecy, intolerance, political betrayal, and a drug that lets one talk to the dead.
From 2015 to 2018, he was part of the staff at Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show as Reprint Editor, replacing Darrell Schweitzer as the magazine's interviewer.

## Klingonist

Schoen founded the Klingon Language Institute and has published Klingon translations of William Shakespeare's plays Hamlet (The Klingon Hamlet, ISBN 978-0671035785) and Much Ado About Nothing (ISBN 978-1587155017), as well as the Epic of Gilgamesh (ISBN 978-1587153389) and the Tao Te Ching (ISBN 978-0964434523). In the realm of Klingon nonfiction, Schoen edited and published The Grammarian's Desk (978-0964434530), a collection of essays written by Captain Krankor (Rich Yampell). He also served as the editor of HolQeD (ISSN 1061-2327), the quarterly journal of the KLI, for the entirety of its 13-year run. He was featured in Director Alexandre O. Philippe's documentary about the Klingon Language Institute, Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water (2004). In 2011, he produced a daily Klingon language podcast called DaHjaj Hol. (See Klingon Language Institute#Publications and translations.)

## Small press publisher

Schoen is the publisher and chief editor for Paper Golem, a speculative fiction small press started in November, 2006. The first book it published was Prime Codex, an anthology of previously published stories by members of the Codex Writers Group, of which Schoen is a founding member. Paper Golem is Schoen's vehicle for "paying it forward," and focuses on two mains tracks: publishing single author collections by relatively new authors (e.g., Cat Rambo in 2009, Eric James Stone in 2011), and the Alembical series, which produces anthologies of original novellas (J. Kathleen Cheney's novella "Iron Shoes", from Alembical 2, received a nomination for the Nebula Award).

## Hypnotist

In 2013, Schoen took a page from one of his fictional creations and became certified as a hypnotherapist by the International Association of Professional Conversational Hypnotists (IAPCH), with the intention of developing materials to aid other writers grappling with problems common to their field (e.g., writer's block).