Poet
Sharon studied poetry writing while living and working in New York City. She attended workshops at the Academy of American Poetry, the Poetry Society of America, the 92nd Street Y, and the McBurney Y. Her teachers were Nancy Schoenburger, William Matthews, Stephen Dobbins, and Paul Muldoon. She spent many summers in Saratoga Springs, New York at the Corporation of Yaddo artist colony, where she was a Special Assistant to the President. Her poems have been published in national and international journals and anthologies. Her chapbooks and collections of poems are published by Green Rock Press, Coffeehouse Press, Floating Bridge Press, Black Heron Press, and Ex Ophidia Press.
Teacher
Sharon taught high school for seven years at Brooklyn Technical High School, and the Bridge to Medicine program for under-represented groups at York College, preparing talented students for careers in the medical professions. After earning a Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in Manhattan, she taught at Seattle University for twenty-four years before retiring in 2018. She spent a sabbatical year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying New Media and emerging genres of literature on the Internet. At SU she taught American Literature, New Media Studies, Orality and Literacy Studies, and Lyric and Narrative Poetry writing. She directed the Seattle University Creative Writing Program for six years.
Arts Reviewer
Sharon writes arts reviews and essays for the Seattle Gay News. She covers the Seattle Opera, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Whim W’Him Dance Company, the Meany Center for the Arts World Dance Series, Pacific MusicWorks, the Early Music Guild, and Men in Dance. Before becoming a teacher and a poet, Sharon had a career in arts management in New York City. She worked in marketing and development at the Henry Street Settlement, The Phoenix Theater, The Lincoln Center Theater Company, the Metropolitan Opera, and CAMI (Columbia Artists Management). She also developed the Front and Center Program for Seattle Opera, providing reduced-price tickets for college students, and established an ongoing grant from the Nauheim Straus Foundation to support opera attendance for SU students. This exposure to the arts, together with a devotion to opera, music, and dance qualified her to work as a reviewer and critic. Her goal is to promote the arts and support not-for profit arts in the Seattle region.
Also…
Sharon is married to the letterpress printer, James T. Jones, a retired English professor from Missouri State University. She and Jim live in Shoreline, Washington. Together hey belong to the Book Club of Washington, and Sharon is a member of The Daguerreian Society, for people who collect early photography. She collects daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes found in Union Cases—ornamental thermoplastic cases necessary to early photographs. She has studied early photography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
