William Patrick’s works have been published or produced in a number of genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and drama. His most recent book, Metrofix: The Combative Comeback of a Company Town, was published in the fall of 2021.
Three of his previous nonfiction books — Learning at the Speed of Light: How Online Education Got to Now; The Call of Nursing: Voices from the Front Lines of Health Care; and Courageous Learning: Finding a New Path through Higher Education, were published by Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press between 2011 and 2017
Saving Troy, published by SUNY Press in 2009, is a creative nonfiction chronicle of a year spent riding along with professional firefighters and paramedics. From that experience, Patrick also wrote a screenplay, Fire Ground, as well as a radio play, Rescue, which was commissioned by the BBC and aired on BBC 3. An earlier teleplay, Rachel’s Dinner, starring Olympia Dukakis and Peter Gerety, was aired nationally on ABC-TV, and his third feature-length screenplay, Brand New Me, was optioned by Force Ten Productions of Los Angeles and used as the basis for the remake of The Nutty Professor.
His memoir in poetry, We Didn’t Come Here for This (1999), was published by BOA Editions, as was These Upraised Hands (1995), a book of narrative poems and dramatic monologues, and a novel, Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family, which won the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for fiction.
Mr. Patrick is the recipient of awards in writing from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Arts Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. He has taught at Salem State University, Old Dominion University, The College of St. Rose, and The University at Albany. He also founded and directed the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute – a two-week summer writing camp at Skidmore College for high school writers – from 1999 through 2019. Mr. Patrick has been a faculty member in Fairfield University’s MFA Program in Writing since 2009.
