Ricketts, Patricia: - Patricia Ricketts taught English for many years in Chicagoland and Kansas City school districts. She received a lifelong love of music, the written word, the visual arts, and healthy arguing from her Irish Catholic household. She has been penning essays, short stories, poems, and novels for most of her life; however, after receiving a scholarship to the University of Edinburgh for creative writing in 2010, her passion for writing escalated. Since then, she has had short stories published in New Directions, The Slate, Meta, The Blue Hour Magazine, and Realize Magazine, and on NPR's "This I Believe" website. She is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled The End of June. Ricketts raised two fine daughters and one stand-up son and has six beautiful grandchildren who all live in the Kansas City area. She lives with her partner, Peter Hurley, in Chicago.