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Patricia Reiss Brooks was born in Lake Placid, the youngest of Daisy and Julian Reiss’s six children. She is a graduate of St. Bernard’s Grammar School in Saranac Lake, Lake Placid Central High and LeMoyne College in Syracuse.


She spent most of her childhood and teenage years exploring the Adirondack fire trails and logging trails with first her pony (at age ten) and progressing on to a horse (at age 13). During those wonderful school-free days she would saddle up right after breakfast and find something to do with her horse all day; tying him to a tree when it was time for lunch, or taking a dip in the lake with him on a hot afternoon.


Patti, as she is known to her family and friends, started writing as soon as she could spell and was a frequent contributor to her grammar school publication, “The Clarion.” At age 16, she sold her first article to a nationwide magazine for $3.00! She now has over 500 published articles in regional and national magazines and papers including “Good Housekeeping,” “The Hartford Courant,” “The Morgan Horse,” “Yankee Pedlar,” “Equine Journal,” etc.


Today Patti lives on a Morgan Horse Farm in East Lyme, CT. where she and her husband, Bob, have raised and trained hundreds of Morgan Horses. Her novel-in-progress is set in the horse world.

The need to ride and write have dominated Patti Brooks’ life. There were times when she and her husband, Bob, had as many as a hundred Morgan Horses on their farm in East Lyme, CT. Although she has been an avid horse show exhibitor, her real love is competitive distance riding and she has always been game to take on off-beat endeavors. Brooks and her stallion, Peppertime, appeared in TV commercials and were chosen to jump out of a horse-size birthday cake to celebrate the bicentennial of the Morgan Horse.

It’s inevitable that horses often trot into Brooks’ writing. She sold her first article at age sixteen and that gave her the incentive to keep writing. Brooks has hundreds of articles in regional and national magazines, including Goodhouskeeping. She wrote a monthly column for several equine publications. Her first novel, Mountain Shadows has been chosen as required reading in some NY State high schools.

Brooks served as President of the New England Morgan Horse Assn. and has been inducted into the American Morgan Horse Association’s Hall of Fame. Currently she is serving a term as President of the Eastern Competitive Trail Ride Assn. and teaches a fiction writing class at a local community college.