About Sherrie
Bio
Sherrie Fernandez-Williams is a writer and teaching artist who earned her MFA in Writing from Hamline University. She is a 2021-2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2021 Black Voices in Children’s Literature winner. She received an Artist Initiative Award through the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, a SASE/Jerome Grant, a Jones’ Commission Award through the Playwrights’ Center, a Givens Black Writers Collaborative Fellowship, and was a Loft Mentor Series Winner in Creative Nonfiction.
Author Soft: A Memoir and Goddess of the Whole Self, her essays can be found in anthologies including, We are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, How Dare We Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse and The Poverty and Education Reader. Her poetry is featured in the chapbook anthology, Can’t Stop Won’t: Poems in the Wake of Racial Injustice, New Limestone Review, and the minnesota review by Duke University Press, among others. She teaches creative writing and composition at colleges and community settings. She co-curates the Queer Voices Reading Series with LM Brimmer in collaboration with Hennepin County Libraries.
A Word From the Author
I find comfort in the idea of Goddess, a Goddess who doesn’t necessarily exist to protect me but will protect me when necessary; a source of wisdom, helping me discover my special.
This Goddess is quiet, most present in stillness.
This Goddess encourages me to progress but accept my limitations–Strive but not at the expense of anyone’s well-being, including mine.
This Goddess knows how I hurt even though invisible wounds are nearly impossible to describe. This Goddess needs no explanation because they hurt in similar ways. This Goddess relates.
This Goddess knows the history of my DNA, each marker, and each person who provided me with that marker. They remind me to invite helpful ancestors to participate. I would not be without them.
This Goddess knows what’s been handed to me, what’s been hurled at me, and what I’ve harvested for myself.
This Goddess reminds me the interior isn’t everything. There is a world outside–wrestle with it. It cannot be escaped. Although I do not always feel safe as a black, queer person, who values harmony, this Goddess offers strategies for living in a hostile world. They remind me I am one of many residents. We’ve been brought up together in this era, like family. Sometimes family can be hard to understand.
This Goddess understands when I say I feel deeply rooted and unrooted at the same time. There is bravery in being unrooted or uprooted from what you once believed. Be rooted in this.
Personal Life
Sherrie Fernandez-Williams discovered her need for words in Brooklyn, New York, where she was born and raised. She ”grew up” as a writer in Minnesota. She resides and teaches in the Twin Cities.
(I am the one with the yellow shirt holding Still, camera shy after all these years. the yellow balloon with a small fraction of my siblings and an even smaller fraction of My cousins. I was one of nine siblings and one of about forty first cousins. The few from my generation are with Aunt Alice–who was one of ten siblings.)
Best Author Award 2016
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World's #1 Best-selling Book 2014
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NYT Best-selling Author 2013
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“Although our paths are not all the same although the stories are not all the same, (we, of course, know the dangers of thoughtless suppositions ) what we share is the ability to see each other, and what we share are our foremothers of verse and prose and foreknowing, and what we share is our need to tell tales, and what we share is our allegiance to witnessing all the ways we pay homage.”
Sherrie Fernandez-Williams
Follow @sfernandezwilliams
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