Patricia Linderman

Patricia Linderman served as volunteer AAFSW president from 2011-2015. You may also know her from the books she has co-edited, Realities of Foreign Service Life, Volumes 1 and 2, with royalties going to AAFSW, as well as A Cup of Culture and a Pinch of Crisis, a collection of essays about cross-cultural food experiences, which benefits the non-profit Tales from a Small Planet, www.talesmag.com. 

Throughout her 27 years as a Foreign Service family member, she has contributed to efforts to share honest, candid information about Foreign Service life. She was a founding volunteer with Talesmag, which went online with the “Real Post Reports” way back in 1999, and she has helped moderate Foreign Service online groups such as Livelines and FSParent since the early 2000s. As AAFSW’s president, she organized EFM art and business fairs as well as informational events on topics such as third-culture kids, unaccompanied tours, dealing with grief after transitions, and building resilience. Seeing new online resources arising for the Foreign Service community but realizing that many people were unaware of them, she joined a volunteer team that created the Foreign Service Hub, which gathers governmental, non-profit and social media resources in a single site. Her information-sharing has also included humorous offerings, such as the musical play for AAFSW’s 50th anniversary (co-authored with Francesca Kelly and edited/directed by Debbi Miller), featuring songs such as “Wake Me Up When the Packout Ends.”

With a B.S. in biology and an M.A. in German, she has worked as a freelance writer, editor, translator and language teacher while accompanying her FSO husband and two sons to Trinidad, Chile, Cuba, Germany, Ecuador and Mexico. After losing 43 pounds in 2014 and discovering her inner athlete, she became a certified personal trainer and health coach, and she now offers transformational health coaching to clients in Northern Virginia and overseas, through her website FierceAfter45.com.