Meet Lee Sharkey, the 2010 Literary Arts Fellow

Lee Sharkey, the 2010 Literary Arts Fellow, has shares a common background with this year's Traditional Arts Fellow.

It was in 1974 when Lee Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type, and produced over the course of a Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Under the imprint South Solon Press, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry and portfolios of other poets’ work. Since then, she has continued to work as a writer and editor. Her publications include three full-length volumes: A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008); To A Vanished World (Puckerbrush Press, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust; and farmwife (Puckerbrush Press, 1977).



In 2006, Lee received the Maryanne Hartman Award for her contributions to the arts and civic life in Maine. In 1997 she received the Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Since 2003 she has co-edited the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl writes of A Darker, Sweeter String that "If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they'd wake us up to the urgency of our times."