ABOUT AMY WACHSPRESS

Amy Wachspress was raised in Schenectady, New York. She lived in a number of locations in New England and the Midwest, and she traveled extensively in Europe, Canada, Israel, and the U.S., before settling in California in 1978. She moved to the Portland, Oregon area in 2021. She is the daughter of mathematician Dr. Eugene Wachspress and social worker Natalie Wachspress.

Amy earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Drama from Syracuse University, her master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and she completed her coursework for her Ph.D. in English at Washington University in St. Louis but bailed before writing her dissertation. She attended the Bread Loaf School of English Graduate School through Middlebury College in Vermont for four summers. She received her Holistic Nutritionist Certification from Bauman College in 2015.

Amy worked for over a dozen years as a scenic carpenter, scenic artist, welder, stagehand, and theater technician. She was the first woman hired to work on permit as a scenic carpenter in the traditionally all-male union in San Francisco. She worked as a scenic artist and sculptor for the San Francisco Opera Association and the San Francisco Ballet for six seasons. She also worked as a scenic carpenter in many non-union theater shops, such as the Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Magic Theater.

After leaving the field of technical theater, she worked as a writer and editor and later a Head Start administrator. In 2000, she became an independent contractor writing grants for organizations all over the country and continues in that profession to this day. In the 1980s, Amy worked as a peace and justice activist in Berkeley, California. She was a founding member of Kehilla Community Synagogue, the first synagogue in the Jewish Renewal Movement to be formally incorporated.

Amy and her husband Ron Reed raised their three children on 40 acres of remote forest, accessible only by a dirt road, in rural northern California. In 2021 they decamped to the Pacific Northwest to be near their grandchildren.