This website showcases both my long life in writing and my newer work in mixed media. Below is my writing bio. You’ll find my artist statement on a separate page.
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. 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, and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God and The Journals of Scheherazade. She has published three chapbooks: Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, and a chapbook of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien.
She has published three memoirs, Fifty Miles, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, and Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair.
She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century. With Sarah Shotland she co-edited Words Without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence and Incarceration.