Laurie S.
Sherman

A Voice at the Intersection

Feminist, Jewish, playwright, poet, essayist — writing where theater meets liturgy.

She published her first poem in a literary journal at the age of eight — and received a check for twenty-five dollars. A year later she was a professional singer, dancer, and model in Hollywood, performing through her eighteenth year. That early formation — the discipline of the body, the breath, the room, and the word — never left her. For fifty years she has continued as a stage director and producer, shaping theater from the inside out. She still sings.

But the stage was never the whole of it. A whole-life activist — Jewish, Reform, and unrelenting — she has spent most of her adult life making the world more livable: environmental advocacy, nonviolent direct action, arts leadership, cultural tourism, dance, and civic campaigns that have taken her into city halls and community spaces across the country. In 2003, the Public Relations Society of America inducted her into its College of Fellows — one of the field's highest honors — and she has won virtually every award in business communications that exists.

Her academic life is equally wide. She holds a Ph.D. in Ancient Communications — the study of theater at its origins — alongside graduate degrees in psychology, creative writing, and public health. That breadth is not incidental. It is the engine of everything she writes.

More than ten books are in print, with more in progress. Poetry — sonnets, free verse, haiku — sits beside non-fiction psychology, theater theory, feminist Jewish liturgy, sacred plays, and essay. Each form is a different instrument; the music is always hers.

Her most recent book, The Miriam Syndrome, examines a pattern as old as power itself: the effective, creative woman who is brought in to transform an organization, a business, a cause — and does — only to be diminished, sidelined, and erased. Two new plays exploring the same mechanism of erasure are nearing completion.

Her poetry is spiritual and Sonoran, rooted in the austere beauty of the desert she calls home in Green Valley, Arizona. Her scholarship is rigorous. Her theater is ritual. Her liturgy is alive.

She teaches, lectures, and gives readings — often throughout Southern Arizona — and is currently preparing an online practical course on ritual. Through the Hineni Circle Project, she and her collaborators bring readings, short talks, and performances to communities near and far. They can also help you create your own ritual performance. All are welcome.

She writes from the intersection of stage and Spirit, where a woman's voice rises to reclaim the text.