Lawrence M. Schoen was born in Chicago, Illinois, but brought up in California. While he was young, he worked with his father at swap meets each weekend. This ended when he went to college to study psychology and linguistics. He graduated with a Doctoral degree from Kansas and began teaching and research. He currently lives “near Philadelphia with his wife, Valerie, who is neither a psychologist nor a Klingon speaker.”

He runs a small press called Paper Golem, which is dedicated to “breaking” new writers in speculative fiction, particularly in the novella market.

In 1992, he established the Klingon Language Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of the Klingon language. Around this time, he also left academia for the private sector in mental health and substance abuse facilities in the Philadelphia area and began writing fiction. He published one story in the Star Trek universe in Strange New Worlds III called “jubHa”. In 2000, he was interviewed in Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 14.