[2] Following her MFA, Schumacher held brief appointments as an instructor at Saint Olaf College and other academic institutions before joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota as an associate professor in 1996.
She has won multiple teaching awards and served as Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota for twelve years.
Schumacher is also the author of the national best-seller, Dear Committee Members, for which she was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
In 2014, Kirkus Reviews called Dear Committee Members a “funny epistolary novel composed of recommendation letters written by a caustic, frustrated and cautiously hopeful English professor named Jason Fitger.
"[7] In 2018, Schumacher published The Shakespeare Requirement, a literary "satire that oscillates between genuine compassion and scathing mockery with admirable dexterity" (Kirkus).