About

Tricia Snell is a Canadian-American writer and flutist.

She writes stories, poems, essays, reviews, and songs and is the author of the book Artist Communities (Allworth Press). Her writing has been published in Art Papers, Oregon Humanities, The Oregonian, and The Grove Review, and been read by actor Barbara Rappaport on the National Public Radio show, The Sound of Writing.

As a flutist and recorder player, Tricia has performed in duos, trios, chamber music groups, community orchestras, and contra dance bands. She sings and writes songs, accompanying herself on guitar, and is a trained music teacher (Suzuki and Music Together certified).

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from George Mason University, (Fairfax, Virginia, USA) and an ARCT flute performance degree from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).

Tricia has led two arts nonprofits and been a writer/project manager for environmental organizations. She was most recently Executive Director of Caldera, an Oregon youth arts and artist residency nonprofit (2007-2017 and founding Executive Director of the international network of artist residency programs, the Alliance of Artists Communities (1994-2002).

She is a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum-Oregon (Class XXVI), and has held a range of public service and arts grant panelist roles. In 2015 she was proud to accept, on behalf of Caldera, a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, presented to her and a Caldera student Alena Nore by First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House in Washington DC.

She lives in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada and Portland, Oregon, USA.

Summaries of Tricia’s writing, music, teaching, and nonprofit leadership experience are included in the relevant sections of this web site. A résumé or full Curriculum Vitae are available upon request.

Duality and Moveable Home

As a dual Canadian-American citizen, Tricia has one foot in each country.

She lives some of the year in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, and some of the year in Portland, Oregon, USA. She grew up in the small town of Port Hope, just east of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and studied and worked in Toronto for most of her twenties. For the next three decades she resided mostly in the United States (Washington DC, San Francisco, California, and Portland, Oregon), until returning to Canada in 2017.

Tricia has family roots in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, where she spent summers as a child and where her father was born. She has ongoing ties with family and friends there, and her extended family hold reunions there. She also has roots in Caterham, Surrey, England, where her mother was born; she visited there every three years as a child and several times since as an adult. Now, with her husband’s family in Tacoma, Washington, USA, and her son Lucas Snell Biepiel in Portland, Oregon, where she has lived the past twenty years, her roots extend to the Pacific Northwest of the United States as well.

Her writing subjects tend to focus on this duality / movable home subject, on family and women’s stories, on music, on politics, and on the ocean in all its mystery.