“twenty-two years old

black

and beautiful

face always smiling

sparkling

brown eyes say

he’s in there

with soul”

Thus begins the poem, “Sunshine,” by Sheryl L. Nelms.  After spending a week at the Iowa State School for the Mentally and Physically Handicapped in Red Oak, Iowa, Sheryl wrote this moving tribute to a young resident in the school.  “He was bed-bound and could move nothing except his eyes,” she said. “He could not talk.  The nurses who took care of him called him Sunshine.  He always had a smile on his face.”

Sheryl is from Marysville, Kansas.  She graduated from South Dakota State University with a B.S. in Family Relations and Child Development.

She has had over 4,500 poems, stories and articles published.  Some of the magazines, anthologies and textbooks that have used her work are: READERS DIGEST, MODERN MATURITY, KALEIDOSCOPE, CAPPER’S, GRIT, COUNTRY WOMAN, POETRY NOW, CONFRONTATION, Strings, This Delicious Day, The American Anthology and Men Freeing Men.

Fourteen collections of her poetry have been published.  Some of them are:

Their Combs Turn Red In The Spring, The Oketo Yahoos, Strawberries and Rhubarb, Rural America, Land of the Blue Paloverde, Friday Night Desperate, Aunt Emma Collected Teeth, Secrets of the Wind, Howling At the Gibbous Moon, Greatest Hits 1978-2003 and Bluebonnets, Boots and Buffalo Bones.

 She has taught writing and poetry classes at conferences, colleges and schools in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and South Dakota.  She recently taught workshops at Amarillo College, The University of Texas at Dallas, Abilene Christian University, Tarleton State University, the Society of Children’s Book Writers Conference in Arlington, Texas and at the Tarrant County College.  She was a Bread Loaf Contributor at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Middlebury, Vermont.

She was the Editor of OAKWOOD, the SDSU literary magazine.  She was a Contributing Editor to BYLINE, a national writers’ magazine and to STREETS, a national literary magazine.  She was the Editor of CRAWFORD’S CHRONICLES, an insurance trade publication.  She has been a Staff Writer for several newspapers and magazines.  She is currently the Fiction/Non-Fiction Editor of THE PEN WOMAN MAGAZINE, the national magazine of the National League of American Pen Women.

She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, The Society of Southwestern Authors and Trinity Writers Workshop.

She makes a living as an insurance agent.  She is also a painter, a weaver and an old dirt biker.

Hope Whispers is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and www.whisperingangelbooks.com.