Lawrence M. Schoen (born July 27, 1959) is an American author, publisher, psychologist, and expert in the Klingon language. The youngest of four children, Schoen was born in Chicago, Illinois, but his family moved to southern California when he was eighteen months old and he grew up in Culver City, California. In 1983 he graduated with B.S. in psycholinguistics from the California State University at 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. During his graduate study, 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 currently serves as the director of research and chief compliance officer for a medical center which provides mental health and addiction treatment service works throughout Philadelphia. Schoen lives in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.
Schoen is the founder of the Klingon Language Institute and has published Klingon translations of William Shakespeare's plays 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 reportedly written by Captain Krankor. He also served as the editor of HolQeD (ISSN 1061-2327), the quarterly journal of the KLI, for the entirety of its thirteen-year run. In 2011 he produced a daily Klingon language podcast called DaHjaj Hol.
In 2007, Schoen was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Some of his more notable works as an author include the Amazing Conroy series of science fiction stories and novels about a space-traveling stage hypnotist and his alien companion animal that can consume anything and farts oxygen; short story "The Sky's The Limit" (originally published in All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (ISBN 978-0972054775), which made the preliminary ballot for the 2005 Nebula Awards; and "The Moment", a finalist for the Hugo Award for best short story in 2010. In 2012 one of his Amazing Conroy stories, "Yesterday's Taste" was nominated for the WSFS Small Press Award.
Schoen is also the publisher and chief editor for Paper Golem, a speculative fiction small press started in November, 2006. The first book published by Paper Golem 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).
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