Sheryl St. Germain
Sheryl St. Germain is an American poet and essayist whose work is deeply rooted in the landscapes, cultures, and sorrows of Louisiana, particularly New Orleans, while reaching outward to address questions of addiction, environmental destruction, family, and survival that resonate far beyond any single region. Born and raised in New Orleans, St. Germain brings to her writing an intimate knowledge of Cajun culture, the Gulf Coast ecosystem, the pleasures of food and music and community that define New Orleans life, and the particular devastation wrought on that life by poverty, addiction, and natural disaster. She holds advanced degrees in creative writing and is a professor and the director of the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.
Her poetry collections include Making Bread at Midnight (1992), How Heavy the Breath of God (1994), The Hunger Sutras (2004), and Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems (2007), which brings together the full arc of her career and demonstrates the consistency and development of her voice across three decades. Her poems about New Orleans are among the most vivid and emotionally truthful accounts of that city in American literature — she writes about it with the authority of someone who has loved it deeply, who has been formed by it, and who has also witnessed its suffering and its resilience.
Beyond her poetry, St. Germain is the author of the memoir Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Song of Despair (2012), which interweaves her personal experiences with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina with meditations on addiction — her son’s heroin addiction and her own family’s struggles with substance abuse — in ways that are both heartbreaking and illuminating. Her essay collections and her work in lyric nonfiction demonstrate a prose style as precise and emotionally intelligent as her poetry.
St. Germain has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Institute of Letters, and other organizations. Her work has been widely anthologized and taught, and she is recognized as one of the essential voices in Southern American literature and in the literature of addiction and recovery. Her commitment to bearing witness to the communities and landscapes she loves, and to telling difficult truths about them without sentimentality or despair, is the defining quality of her literary achievement.