Mary-Sherman Willis
Mary-Sherman Willis
Adjunct Professor
Contact:
Phillips Hall, 623
Mary-Sherman Willis is a native of Washington DC and lives in Rappahannock County, VA. She worked in journalism and publishing for many years in the US and England, and has been a professor of creative writing for the past decade at George Washington University, NYU/Shanghai, as well as a workshop leader at the Writer House/Charlottesville and other venues. Her private students in memoir and fiction have been published widely.
1981 BS Journalism and Science, University of Maryland, College Park
2005 MFA Warren Wilson Program for Writers, Swannanoa, NC
Poems, essays, blogs, and reviews have appeared in the New Republic, The Plum Review, the Hudson Review, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, American Scholar, Archipelago.org, Poet Lore, Beltway, Gargoyle, the Cortland Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Plume, Eleven Eleven, among other publications. In July 2008 her poem “The Laughter of Women” appeared in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry syndicated newspaper column. Poems have been anthologized in Family Pictures and Not What I Expected, the Unpredictable Road from Womanhood to Motherhood. A short story appeared in Electric Grace. An essay on revising a sonnet appeared in Poem, Revised.
Caveboy, a chapbook, was published in 2012 by Artist’s Proof Editions.
Graffiti Calculus, a book-length poem, was a semi-finalist for the Tupelo First/Second Book Award, and was published by CW Books in 2013.
A translation of Jean Cocteau’s Appogiatures, Grace Notes was published by The Word Works in 2017.
A Long Shoot Sweeping was a semi-finalist for the Bull City/Frost Place Chapbook Competition.