Timothy Schmand was born in Buffalo, New York on March 10, 1956. One of six children, he spent his early years pursuing adventures in the vacant lot and on the railroad tracks behind his house. The lot’s pond became the Mississippi, the railroad’s embankment the Himalayas. Cement-mixing tubs passed for Huck’s raft and flattened refrigerator boxes served as magic carpets for sliding down those embankment. Schmand and his comrades constructed elaborate tree houses with materials liberated from construction sites and, on more than one occasion, began digging holes to China.
Schmand decided to write fiction while sitting at a dining room table beside a high school girlfriend as she wrote a story for her sophomore composition class. She began (no lie) “It was a dark and stormy evening.” Upon high school graduation and under Thoreau’s sway, Schmand moved to an old cabin on family property in the foothills of the Alleghenies. There he wrote and worked as a farm hand, until the great aunt who owned the cabin insisted he return to the city and register for college.
While pursuing his B.A. in Political Science, Schmand ran boilers and swept floors in Buffalo Public Schools. In 1979, he returned to the woods and built his own cabin using trees from the property and hand tools. With the cabin complete, he began hitchhiking around North America. While in Seattle and Oakland, he helped rehab old houses. In Key West he worked as a laborer. In New Orleans, he sold blood, was a door man on Bourbon Street, burned garbage in the Royal Orleans Hotel and ran a group home for mentally handicapped women. Schmand eventually earned a B.A. in Political Science from State University College of New York at Buffalo and, later, an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. In his adult life Schmand worked on a wagon train as a counselor for troubled children, edited popular and scholarly magazines, managed museums, public parks, sports authorities and business improvement districts.
Schmand’s fiction, though rooted in reality, never strays far from an imagined world where a cement-mixing tub could be Huck’s raft, and a hole dug in the ground might lead to China. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, alongside writers as diverse as Charles Bukowski and John Updike. His Miami observations, from the region’s sex club scene to the recent rash of book bannings, have been published regionally and internationally.
His tale "The Great Deadly Malpus" was awarded the1999 Calvino Prize for Short Fiction. In the late 1990s the editors of The Miami Herald Sunday Magazine, Tropic, identified him as among south Florida’s most popular writers. His novels “Just Johnson: The London Delivery” (which the Huffington Post called a ‘funny, fast-paced spy thriller’) and “The True Tales of Bad Benny Taggart,” published by Jitney Books, are available where books are sold.
Schmand is a certified yoga instructor and lives and writes in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

“Schmand blends humor and magical realism in this historical novel depicting two days of a teenage boy’s suburban life... A funny, thoughtful, and inventive portrait of teen angst.”
– Kirkus Reviews