Biography

Sheryl St. Germain’s work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships. Her most recent single-author book is Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Song of Despair. She co-edited the anthology Words Without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence and Incarceration. In addition to directing the master of fine arts program at Chatham University, she also directs the Words Without Walls program, which sends writers into prisons, jails, and rehab facilities to teach creative writing.

Schedule

10 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.
State Library of Louisiana, Capitol View Room
Discussion
Hardlines: Rough South Poetry

11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

Noon to 12:45 p.m.
State Library of Louisiana, Capitol View Room
Reading
Down to the Dark River

1 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

2 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
State Library of Louisiana, Capitol View Room
Book Talk
Words without Walls

2:45 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

Words without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence, and Incarceration (editor)

More than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers provide inspiration for students in writing workshops in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and other alternative learning environments

Writing workshops in prisons and rehabilitation centers have proven time and again to be transformative and empowering for people in need. Halfway houses, hospitals, and shelters are all fertile ground for healing through the imagination and can often mean the difference for inmates and patients between just simply surviving and truly thriving. It is in these settings that teachers and their students need reading that nourishes the soul and challenges the spirit. 

Words without Walls is an anthology of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration. Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart. Each selection expresses immediacy—writing that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the page—revealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence.

These inspirational pieces act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret.

Hardlines: Rough South Poetry (contributor)

A collection of contemporary poems exploring the grit of work, love, and the land down South

Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright's anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry centers on the darker side of Southern experience while presenting a remarkable array of poets from diverse backgrounds in the American South. As tough-minded as they are high-minded, the sixty contemporary poets and two hundred poems anthologized in Hard Lines enhance the powerful genre of "Grit Lit."

The volume gathers the work of poets who have for decades formed the heart of Southern poetry as well as that of emerging voices who will soon become significant figures in Southern literature. These poems sting our senses into awareness of a gritty world down South: hard work, hard love, hard drinking, hard times; but they also explore the importance of the land and rural experience, as well as race- , gender- , and class-based conflicts.

Readers will see, hear (for poetry is meant to ring in the ears), and feel (for poetry is meant to beat in the blood); there is plenty of raucousness in this anthology. And yet the cultural conflicts that ignite Southern wildness are often depicted in a manner that is lyrical without becoming lugubrious, mournful but not maudlin. Some of these poets are coming to terms with a visibly transforming culture—a "roughness" in and of itself. Indeed many of these poets are helping to change the definition of the South. The anthology also features biographical information on each poet in addition to further reading suggestions and scholarly sources on contemporary poetry.

Down the River Dark: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River (contributor)

Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River contains the work of 100 poets, including Dick Allen, Joseph Bathanti, Kelly Cherry, Malaika Favorite, Ava Leavell Haymon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ted Kooser, Linda Pastan, Virgil Suarez, and Natasha Trethewey.