sharon doubiago

Sharon Doubiago was enabled to poetry by her move with her children to the Mendocino Coast in the fall of 1974. Before that she was mute. Ever since she has fought the tongue's stutter and stammer. Inspired by the visionary mores of the counterculture she has lived most of her adult life since in three vehicles—Roses, Psyche, and Valentine—writing, rather than working full-time in order to write part-time. Her big books, much of which were written out on the Mendocino and Oregon coasts, are: Hard Country, South America Mi Hija, Psyche Drives The Coast, The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, El Nino, The Husband Arcane The Arcane of O, and Body and Soul. With Devreaux Baker and Susan Maeder, she edited Wood, Water, Air and Fire, the Anthology of Mendocino Women Poets (Pot Shard Press, Comptche, 1999).

She has won three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction, The Hazel Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, the California Arts Council Fellowship Award, the Woman Writer Genius Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Gloria Steinem's Woman Writer Award, the Diane Wood Middlebrook-Ann Sexton Memorial Fellowship in Literature at Djerassi, Sigma Delta Chi’s Sports News Reporting First Place Prize, Tom Robbins’ Journalist of the Year Award (“for the most outrageous, risk-taking, life-affirming article published in the Northwest”-- the last two for “Son II”), and many other awards and prizes. The Spring l997 issue of Contemporary Literature (University of Wisconsin) features an extensive interview of Doubiago, focusing on her history and development as an epic poet. She’s read at the MLA (Modern Language Association) with papers presented on her work; at the Western Literature Association's (WLA) and the PAMLA. The March/April 2001 issue of The American Poetry Review features an essay by Alicia Ostriker, "Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness: Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche and Sharon Doubiago." She’s also been nominated twice for the National Book Award, and last year, The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes was selected to The List, Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000 (this is her favorite award).

An unassuming, anti-establishment person still, it goes against her grain to broadcast the above, but in these days of greed, war and hate, she realizes she’s accomplished some things precisely for living outside such and is honored, indeed relieved, to find herself a healthy role model to would-be poets and writers (and even to her grandson who recently asked, clearly flabberghasted, “do you enjoy living this way?”).

Her major oeuvres still unpublished are Son, an autobiography focusing on the mother-son relationship for which she received two Oregon Institute of Literary Arts fellowships, Ramona: Ramon, Mama Cayote Talks to the Boys, My Father’s Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Girl, 2 volumes, Those Who Can’t Hear The Music Think The Dancers are Mad (stories), I and I: Personal and Literary Essays, and Love on the Streets, [Selected and New Poems]. A current quest is the publication of these works, and the many more she still hopes to pull off. Recent publications can be found online.

Currently, also, she is teaching in the Poetics Graduate Program at New College in San Francisco, is an on-line mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota.

Mendocino is her eternal home, where she prays to be buried: O Goddess! Let my body be laid down there.