About
I grew up in a previously flourishing Lancashire seaside resort. I worked various part time jobs from age fourteen, the least favorite being a chamber maid. Art and chemistry were my favorite subjects at high school. Benefitting from free British education I studied medical sciences, attending Cambridge University and London's St Mary's Hospital medical school. I trained first in family practice then in psychiatry, attracted to its unique challenges.
I immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970's moving to Washington state to raise two daughters. I decided to stay. I've worked for non-profits during my career and recently retired from a part-time volunteer medical position.
Early on I traveled extensively on a shoe-string budget while in college, then overland for six months to Afghanistan, Iran, India, Nepal in my late twenties. A staffing post in 2005 on the Semester at Sea circumnavigated the earth. I revisited several countries and witnessed the consequences of population growth and pollution.
The Hedgebrook Foundation and Jackstraw Writers program generously provided valuable experience during my early writing career. Since then I have been a co-editor of an online literary magazine and one of four poets producing a reading series. My visual art and poetry has been accepted in many print magazines and online, including the Raven Chronicles award winning anthology: Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, Strange Fruit, Exhibition, Pontoon, Poetry on the Buses, Ars Medica, Terra Nova, Heliotrope, and The Madrona Project volume 3.
A completed blog exists at: https://sharonmcarter.blogspot.com/ to provide background details and additional visual art related to poems featured in the chapbook. Sometimes poems led to a visual interpretation or the reverse occurred. I hope you enjoy my work.
If you need prompt ideas: Look around you, everything you see quivers with being, the book's epigraph advises. Pay attention.