Best known for her innovative work in expressive or therapeutic writing for cancer patients and others whose voices have been silenced by pain, loss or trauma, Sharon has been leading writing groups for cancer patients and survivors for over a decade. Her two most recent books, When Words Heal: Writing Through Cancer (North Atlantic/Frog Books, 2006) and A Healing Journey: Writing Together through Breast Cancer (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2004) document the healing power of writing. In 2007, together with Pat Fobair, LCSW,she co-edited an anthology of cancer patients' writing, Learning to Live Again, published by the Stanford School of Medicine.
Sharon grew up in in the shadow of Mt. Shasta in Northern California and completed her B.A. and a year of graduate study at San Jose State University before moving to Canada. She lived and worked in Canada for twenty-three years, completing her master's degree at Mt. St. Vincent University and her doctoral degree at the University of Toronto. She later studied creative writing and literary fiction at Humber School for Writers in Toronto, completed a certificate in literary fiction at University of Washington extension's Writers' Program and studied transformative language arts at Goddard College.
Her first book (a children's book), This Way to Canada, was written while she was a young mother in Nova Scotia. Since, Sharon has written and published poetry, memoir and personal essays. Her work has appeared in Moxie Magazine, Looking Back: Stories of our Mothers and Fathers in Retrospect, The Santa Clara Weekly,The Art of Grandparenting,Coping with Cancer Magazine, Goddard's Semester Magazine,The Listener & the Storyteller Online, and The Transformative Language Arts Reader, and on the DVD, Writing Alone and With Others, among others.
For the past few years, Sharon has authored a weekly blog of inspirational writing prompts for anyone dealing with cancer or debilitating illness. (www.writingthroughcancer.com or www.writingthroughcancer.wordpress.com). She continues to speak at cancer organizations and healthcare symposia across the U.S. (For more information about her presentations, click here.) andleads a regular series of expressive writing workshops for patients and survivors at Scripps Green Cancer Center in La Jolla. CA and Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, CA. She leads "The Writers' Workshop at Stanford Medical School," a monthly creative writing workshop for faculty, students and alumni and teaches creative nonfiction for the UCLA extension Writers' Program. She also teaches an annual week-long course in writing and healing during the Pacific School of Religion's summer session in Berkeley, CA. She is currently completing a novel. Sharon lives with her husband, John, and a neurotic toy poodle named Kramer, in San Diego, CA.
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