Kurtz grew up in Pittsburgh. After graduating from high school, she attended Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pa., where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English. At first, she was a chemistry major, wanting to teach chemistry because she had a teacher in high school who taught it so well that she enjoyed it.

She later switched her major to math. In ninth grade, she took geometry and spent some of her time helping her classmates who were struggling. The geometry teacher approached Kurtz one day and said she hoped that she was going to be a teacher one day.

“She said I was good at it,” Kurtz recalled.

Again, she changed her major when she realized that she enjoyed writing more than anything else. An English teacher she had in seventh grade let the class do creative writing and it sparked an interest.

Submitted Photo Patti Kurtz walks with her beagle named Elanor while searching for things that catch her eye to photograph.

“Star Trek” is one of her favorite shows. She and a group of friends from junior high didn’t like that the show had a male-dominant cast, so they wrote fan fiction, inserting themselves into the story.

However, during her first year at Waynesburg University, she began writing her own stories and creating her own characters to get published. Fan fiction cannot be published because the characters and story belong to the creator.

Upon graduating in just three and a half years, she went into television for a number of years before deciding it was time to move on to something else. In order to teach at a college level, a master’s degree is required. The next thing on her agenda was receiving her master’s degree in English from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania.

With that under her belt two and a half years later, Kurtz began teaching at a community college in Steubenville, Ohio. At the time, she was living in Pennsylvania, having to cross state lines to go to work five days a week.

“I spent more time driving than I did in the classroom,” she said.

At that point, she was only making enough to make ends meet, so she started sending applications for full-time positions to different colleges. In the descriptions, they said that a doctorate degree wasn’t required, but it was preferred.

After not getting any hits on the applications, she went after a doctorate in English through Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho. It specifically focused around teaching, writing and literature, which was exactly what she wanted. She laughed when she said one of the reasons that she chose to go to Idaho was “the catalog had mountains on it.” A fun fact that she looks back on is one of the professors at ISU is Jeffrey Meldrum, who is a sasquatch enthusiast who has written novels about the creature.

The doctorate took her the longest amount of time: five years. It was more tedious just because it did span a longer time period and there was so much that she had to do. Some of the requirements were taking four levels of a foreign language, taking other interdisciplinary courses and writing two papers. The papers were each over 100 pages long, and they had to go through readers and faculty members for revisions, then be defended. Oral comprehensive exams were also required, in which she could be asked about anything from the past five years spent in the program.

She went back to Ohio to teach at a four-year private college in Tiffin. Unfortunately, she was only able to teach two technical writing courses each semester along with other English and linguistics classes. The creative writing classes were being “saved” for a different professor, so she could not teach the class she was she most passionate about.

The degree that she is the most proud of is her master’s in the fine art of writing popular fiction. In 2016, she received her MFA from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa. The reason she is the most proud of it is that she earned it while she was working full-time at MSU. A lot of people told her that it’s very difficult to work full-time and complete a terminal degree, which means there isn’t a degree past the MFA for her to work toward.

Striving toward the MFA gave her an opportunity to make her writing better. In addition, she chose the program because it was specifically aimed at the type of writing she’s interested in. When she was finishing her MFA, the professor wanted her to explain why she wanted the degree. Jokingly, Kurtz answered, “I want more letters behind my name.”

Popular fiction is what she writes, mainly focusing on young adult fiction. Young adult fiction’s main audience is readers ages 13 to about 21, but many in other age groups read it. In YA literature, the main character of the story is between the ages of 13 and 21 and trying to figure out who they are, what they are, where they belong, what they want to do with their lives, etc.

When Kurtz was in her teen years, the only young adult fiction was about romance and teen pregnancy. Neither of those interested her and she wanted to write “more serious young adult fiction that wasn’t fluff or romance.”

“For teens, everything is so intense and everything is a big deal,” she explained. She really likes writing about teens who are displaying teenage behaviors and throwing them into situations in which they have serious choices to make that could help shape who they are.

Kurtz said a lot of the main characters in her novels are like her in some ways and completely different in others.

“Some of it is wish fulfillment,” she said. “It’s like ‘I wish I had been them at that age’ or who the author thinks they are. I make (my characters) different or more interesting than I really am.”

The novel that she has been working on the longest is about a teen who experiences the 1889 flood that hit Johnstown, Pa., killing just over 2,200 people and causing about $17 million in damage. In 2019 currency, the cost in damage would be around an estimated $484 million. Kurtz began working on the novel around the time the 2011 flood hit Minot.

Her MFA novel project is about a teenage girl who wants to do higher level stock car racing like her older brother. Her brother goes missing and she is able to take his place. In combination with racing, she is searching for her brother.

Kurtz is very passionate about stock car racing – an interest that initially stems from watching the cartoon “Speed Racer.” She remembered listening to the female character swooning for Speed but she “wondered why she didn’t just slap him and race herself.”

A novel Kurtz has been editing for submission is about wolf reintroduction in Idaho. She explained that she tends to write about things that upset her, such as people thinking they can kill wolves for fun or for their pelts.

As she has stated on her MSU faculty web page, “Writers write. Writers also read.” Reading helps writers get past blocks and can give them insight as to how one person may work in details and make dialogue from another time period sound accurate. That is one of the things that Kurtz finds difficult. Contemporary literature is obviously more recent, but she can’t use slang from 2020 in a novel that’s based in the late 1800s.

Now as a professor at MSU, she teaches classes on composition, linguistics, creative writing and literature. She thoroughly enjoys teaching at a medium-sized state school.

“The students are motivated and actually want to do stuff,” she said. Her students get enthusiastic about what they are learning, and she likes having the ability to teach multiple different classes.

One thing that she likes to see from her students is what she called “Aha!” moments during her writing classes. They say to themselves that they did a lot of cool things, and that’s what she said makes it worth it. In one of her children’s literature classes, one student approached her and said she really liked the books they read for class. She then asked for other recommendations. Kurtz had a history education major in one of her composition classes and he said that she inspired him to switch to become an English education major instead.

In some of her free time, she takes photos of things that catch her eye. As a hobbyist photographer, most of her pictures are of her dogs.

When she isn’t writing, reading or grading assignments, Kurtz is spending time with her husband, her nine-year-old black lab, Goldberry, and her eight-year-old beagle, Elanor. Elanor went blind a couple of years ago, but she has adjusted well and can make her way around the house without bumping into too many objects.

Goldberry came from a breeder in Scotland, S.D. One of the reasons she and her husband chose her is because black dogs, along with black cats, are the least likely to be taken home. One of the common reasons for that is “they don’t photograph well,” but neither Kurtz nor her husband cared about that.

Writing has been integrated into Kurtz’s life for several years. She shares her immense love for writing with her students, assisting them in improving their writing, preparing them for writing papers for other classes and giving some students a new or renewed passion for writing. The author and professor found exactly where she wanted to be, with many goals achieved and some still to be reached.