Writers House: Resident Coordinator Kerry Sherin
The Almanac
May 13, 1997
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Kerry E. Sherin
Kerry E. Sherin, a Penn alumna now a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Temple, will become Resident Coordinator of the Kelly Writers House on July 1, the House's director, Dr. Alan Filreis, has announced. She will succeed Shawn Walker, C'96, who received the Thouron Award in 1996 which she deferred for a year in order to help establish Writers House.
Ms. Sherin was a religious studies major, C '87, active in the poetry scene, who with a few friends ran a funded weekly reading series called Fresh Fish (bringing to campus Margaret Atwood, Amiri Baraka and Olga Broumas, among others). She also edited 34th Street's book review section and produced a national newsletter on computers in the arts. After graduating, she took an M.A. at the special writing program at Hollins College, and then a second M.A. when she joined the graduate program at Temple. As a graduate student she has taught a number of writing seminars, winning a Temple Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. She also won the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Award for Poetry in 1990.
Her publications include reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer; poems such as the four published recently in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas; and fiction including "A True Story" published in the book From Elvis to Oz. In addition to teaching a poetry writing workshop at Temple she has for several years taught a special evening course there called "Calling All Fiction Lovers," in which students discuss novels by writers appearing in Philadelphia. Before joining Temple's program she worked as an assistant to the film director Jim Jarmusch in New York City, helping particularly with the film Mystery Train and arranging for Jarmusch's showing at the Cannes Film Festival. Faculty advisor to Temple's student literary journal, Parable, she has served as judge in best screenplay contests, at student film festivals, and this term in the undergraduate essay contest at Penn.