Tim Sherry is a husband and father, a grandfather and great-grandfather. He earned a B.A. in English from Pacific Lutheran University and an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago, after which he was a longtime public high school teacher, coach, and principal. He has lived in Chicago and for a short time in Europe, has traveled widely throughout the United States, but has always called Tacoma, Washington home.
For most of his life he kept his writing private with only a few attempts at publication. But with the support of writers in the Tacoma, Auburn, and Olympia writing communities, since 2002 he has had poems published in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, The Broad River Review, Cirque, and The Raven Chronicles, among others. He has been a Pushcart nominee, had his work recognized in contests, and his work has appeared in anthologies. His first full-length collection, One of Seven Billion, was published by Moonpath Press in 2014, and Holy Ghost Town was published in 2019 by Cirque Press.
In his wildest dreams, he never could have imagined…
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Poem from
Pages of White Sky
Walt Whitman as Guide
Turning a corner of lilacs, I keep on towards home with Whitman on my mind— and arrive just as family is arriving for Thanksgiving dinner. The conversation there of politics and money and who believes what is why I went walking—to be ready to be quiet. In the evening after everyone has left, I sit near a window open on the vacant lot across the street with Leaves of Grass on my lap— reading his sprawls across the page wondering how it must have been to walk as he did tramping past carpenters hammering, millers milling, mothers with their children, young men robust in their boldness filling America with their singing when it was vacant with so much of a future.
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Poem from
One of Seven Billion
The Best Doughnuts in the World
Every town has the best doughnuts in the world. The bakery that makes them doesn’t need any more than word of mouth to say so. The sign out front has a catchy name so when you tell the out-of-towners that they have to try a dozen, they will chuckle at Buns and Bread, The Cookie Jar, and not the idea that some baker in someone else’s town is god of all doughnuts. The mythology that keeps cops and commuters coming back to balance coffee and an old-fashioned with their low calorie meals never promises what Swiss chocolate or a dry martini are best at. There is no comparison between a good doughnut and good sex or winning the lottery that stops anyone at a bakery. But everyone knows where the best doughnuts in the world are; and when a job that just pays the bills, kids who will maybe get into junior college, a house that has a single car garage are in a world all their own, nothing tastes better than the glaze that you lick off the corner of your mouth driving down the main street of your home town.
