Poet, Essayist, Fiber Artist
I spent my life as a poet and lyric essayist. When I retired from teaching and directing an MFA program in creative writing in 2019, I bought a sewing machine and learned how to quilt. My last two books had been about my son’s overdose death, and I felt drained from all the words that went into those books. I didn’t want to stop writing, but I wanted to also do something more physical, something that was tactile, like the crocheting I had always done in my spare time. I wanted to explore an art form that could grow widely and deeply and that might be a complement to the writing. I quickly moved from traditional quilting to art quilts, experimenting with improvisational piecing, dyeing my own fabric, and surface design, which feels like the jazz I love embedded into cloth. And I began a journey of imagining fiber art that might act in concert with my writing, making art that in some way responded to writing.
This website showcases both my long life in writing and my newer work in fiber art. Below is my writing bio. You’ll find my artist statement on a separate page. And be sure to check out the new blog, and the workshops and lectures page.
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A native of New Orleans, Sheryl has taught at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, Iowa State University and Chatham University, where she served as Director of the MFA in Creative Writing for 14 years. She is the co-founder and former Director of the Words Without Walls Program, which for over ten years trained graduate students to teach creative writing in prisons, jails and rehabilitation centers. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay.
She was named Louisiana Writer of the Year in November 2018.
Sheryl’s poetry books include The Small Door of Your Death, Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems (both from Autumn House Press), Making Bread at Midnight, (Slough Press), and How Heavy the Breath of God and The Journals of Scheherazade (both from University of North Texas Press). She has published three chapbooks of her own poetry: Going Home (Perivale), The Mask of Medusa (Cross Cultural Communications), and a chapbook of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien (Cross Cultural Communications).
She has also published three memoirs, Fifty Miles (Etruscan Press), Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman (University of Utah Press), and Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair (Louisiana Literature Press).
She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century (Autumn House Press), and with Sarah Shotland she co-edited Words Without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence and Incarceration, (Trinity University Press).
Some Words from Others About My Work:
I do not think I have ever encountered a poet less self-consciously or more powerfully female. St. Germain does not try to intellectualize or abstract her gender; neither does she try to escape from it. I am that I am, as Someone once said: she accepts herself with a fullness, with an intensity, and with a gloriously swaggering melodiousness that are, I think, new to poetry in our language. Burton Raffel
It is Sheryl St. Germain’s voice that will finally get you. Hers is a voice of a master singer, one trained in the ancient ways of telling a story and one fiercely contemporary. It speaks a wild, native tongue, translatable only by the turns we are willing to make to enter deeply into our own experiences as travelers in an almost unbelievable story. Darrell Bourque
Of Fifty Miles:
Sheryl St. Germain’s Fifty Miles is an honest, whole-hearted exploration of addiction and its aftermath, a study of grief, hope, survival, and the cruel reality of failure. While St. Germain’s son Gray did not live to tell his own story, she manages here to tell it with care, compassion, and profound insight. Beautifully-written, deeply-felt, Fifty Miles is the story of so many of us who’ve fought addiction or suffered alongside loved ones caught in the next.
—Dinty W. Moore, Between Panic & Desire.
Of The Small Door of Your Death
These poems chronicle the passage of a mother and her son into the abyss of drugs, sorrow, confusion, hope, despair, and love. The mother’s voice struggles to bear witness, to be present, forgoing excuses while trying to answer why, the question that rings a million times in mothers’ hearts throughout the world, to forever cycle and orbit into every cell of the compassionate and caring heart. This collection gives us answers in gray, neither black nor white, but as they must be in our human experience, gray as the dawn that precedes the rising sun.