Dorothy Hinshaw Patent Papers, 1956-1999

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is the author of over one hundred thirty non-fiction books about science and nature for children and young adults. She was born in Rochester, Minnesota, on April 30, 1940. Her father, H. Corwin Hinshaw, was a physician at the Mayo Clinic. The Hinshaws moved to the San Francisco Bay area in California when Patent was nine years old and she grew up in Marin County. She received her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1962 and her master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. While in graduate school, Dorothy Hinshaw met and married fellow zoology student, Greg Patent.

After graduate school Patent worked as a scientist with two years of post-doctoral work at Sinai Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, and Stazzione Zoologica, in Naples, Italy. She spent several years teaching night school at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, and was full-time on the faculty for six months.

In the 1970s, she began publishing children’s books about science and nature. She got her first publishing contract in 1972 and has been writing non-fiction children’s books ever since. In the early 1980s, she began collaborating on children’s books with photographer, William Muñoz. They have since published over sixty books together.

Patent has also written gardening books for adults with collaborator Diane Bilderback, including The Book of Garden Secrets (1983), which was revised and reissued in 1997. Patent has published numerous articles in such magazines as Organic Gardening, Arizoo, Camas, Falcon, Spider, Wild Outdoor World, among many others. Patent’s photographs have appeared in National Gardening, The Missoulian, and in some of her children’s books. She has coauthored cooking articles and the cookbook A is For Apple with her husband, Greg Patent, an award-winning culinary writer.

Patent has received numerous honors and awards. Many of her books have been chosen as Outstanding Trade Books for Children by the National Science Teachers Association. Her books have also been chosen for the Library of Congress’s Children’s Book of the Year, the Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year, and numerous other awards. Patent and her husband, Greg, live in Missoula, Montana. They have two grown children, David and Jason