Sherry Robbins is an Air Force brat who considers Buffalo home. Sherry has conducted creative writing workshops in Western New York since 1978, for teens and women's shelters, senior citizens, teachers, students, business leaders, for love, for money and for fun. Sherry also owns and operates Weird Sisters Press, has a daughter, two cats and two books of poetry, SNAPSHOTS OF PARADISE and OR, THE WHALE, as well as dozens of poems published in literary journals and anthologies.

She has won a New York State fellowship, a Western New York Poetry residency and an invitation to read her work at the Second International Poetry Conference in Coimbra, Portugal. The high point of her writing life was a recent reading of her Moby Dick poems at Seamen's Bethel Chapel in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

This year Sherry is offering a workshop in poetic autobiography. Students will re-create themselves using early memories, favorite silly word lists, family word portraits, Saturday morning sounds, seasonal sounds, dreams, future fantasies, "my best day," "if I were an animal..." and any other ideas they or their teachers may have. Time and supplies permitting, students will be encouraged to make their own booklets, decorating the covers, binding the books and arranging the poems. The project will involve group cooperation and as well as individual concentration and will help students to realize that they can "shape" their lives imaginatively.
A Bosom Friend
(from OR, THE WHALE)
Anna, you 
are two rooms away 
studiously turning disaster 
into art. How do you 
spell earthquake? How 
do you spell smoke? 
At the bottom of your paper 
a dashed-off sketch in red
ink of houses burning 
and falling. This picturing 
gift was born in you 
but the words above 
the flames are new, 
the concentrated stitching 
up, flame with word, new. 
My word, made flesh, tonight 
you claim your birthright, 
set with your red pen 
the match to a new vocabulary.