Renate Wildermuth writes fiction under the name Adria Townsend because it’s easier to pronounce. She was born in the Bronx (on Townsend Avenue) and was raised in Pennsylvania. She became a writer because maladaptive daydreaming wasn’t yet an official diagnosis when she was growing up in the woods of the Pocono Mountains.
The Chronicle of Glens Falls in upstate New York was the first publication to pay her for her work. Her articles, stories and essays have since appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, The Albany Times Union, Stone Canoe, Adirondack Life Magazine, Collidescope, on Public Radio and the reading app Galatea. Her fiction titles include Home Sweet Stranger, A Remote Chance and To Conquer the Heart of a King.
Renate spent five years working in Manhattan on the administrative side of publishing. Fluent in German, she has spent close to five years living in Germany and Austria. She holds a B.A. in German and English from Moravian University, and an M.A. in German with a concentration in fairy tales from Bowling Green State University.
She is proud to possess a letter from the editors at Merriam-Webster thanking her for finding a mistake in their dictionary when she was a teenager. It proves she has always cared about words and how they are treated. And that Gone Before You Knew Me, a fictional account of a girl trying to make it out of high school alive, may come from lived experience.
She resides in the Adirondacks of upstate New York and south-central Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. She teaches German at Shippensburg University.
