Sheryl St Germain Author & Editor

Words without Walls is a creative partnership between graduate students from Chatham University's MFA program in creative writing and a number of nontraditional classrooms, including the Allegheny County Jail, Sojourner House, a recovery center for women and their children, and other facilities. Students from Chatham teach creative writing courses to male and female inmates at the jail and elsewhere, organize readings of their work, facilitate community workshops after their release, and publish their work in an annual anthology. A native of New Orleans, Sheryl St. Germain is the co-founder and president of the board of Words without Walls. She has taught creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, and Iowa State University. She teaches creative nonfiction and poetry and directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University. Her honors include two NEA fellowships, an NEH fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and most recently the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay. Her books include Going Home; The Mask of Medusa; Making Bread at Midnight; How Heavy the Breath of God; The Journals of Scheherazade; Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems; Je Suis Cadien, translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux; and a collection of lyric essays, Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman. Sarah Shotland is the program coordinator for Words without Walls at Chatham University and is on the faculty at Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, Austin, Spain, and China. Her newest play is Cereus Moonlight, and her novel Junkette is available from White Gorilla Press. She has an MFA from Chatham University.