Patricia Klindienst holds a Ph. D. in Modern Thought & Literature form Stanford University. Once an award-winning scholar and teacher at Yale, she left the profession and began to write for a broader audience. Her first book, THE EARTH KNOWS MY NAME, tells the stories of fifteen ethnic Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens. Praised by readers as diverse as Dr. Jane Goodall, Barry Lopez, and Geoffrey Hartman, Klindienst’s eloquent and passionate rendering of the voices of ethnic peoples is “… essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship, imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.” She is the recipient of an American Book Award for 2007.