Sherry Fairchok
Sherry Fairchok was born in 1962 in Scranton, Pa., to a family that had lived for four
generations in the coal-mining region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. During her early
childhood, her parents relocated to Syracuse, N.Y., where Sherry grew up, published her
first poems in Seventeen magazine, and later enrolled in Syracuse University.
Despite winning the university's 1983 Whiffin Prize for best undergraduate poem, she
dropped out of school and spent nine years working as a secretary. She returned to
Syracuse University to take a bachelor's degree in 1993. After that, she attended various
adult education program and community college poetry workshops until she was encouraged by
Thomas Lux to apply to graduate writing programs. In 1997, Sherry earned an MFA from Sarah
Lawrence College. Her chapbook, "A Stone That Burns," won The Ledge 1999
Chapbook Award. In 2002, she won the Pablo Neruda Prize in the Nimrod/Hardiman Literary
Awards. CavanKerry Press published her first full-length collection of poems, "The
Palace of Ashes," in December 2002. Individual poems have appeared in Ploughshares,
DoubleTake, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest and other journals. Sherry lives in Mt.
Vernon, N.Y., and works as a technical writer at an information technology consulting firm
in Stamford, Conn.
Statement of Poetics
A friend asked me to critique a draft of her witty, fast-paced novel, set mostly in
office parks, strip malls and subdivisions. I didn't mind the anomie or the pop culture
references—but my inability to see a recognizable outdoor landscape anywhere in the
book made my head hurt. I jotted in the margin two questions that I felt had to be
answered: "What did they tear down or build over when they constructed these places?
Where did these people come from, originally?" When I meet someone, I can't feel easy
with him or her until I've "placed" the person in a landscape (with dirt of a
certain color, certain trees, certain weather) and in a family (biological, selected or
collected). I fear the obliteration of the character of particular places; I have a horror
vacui. My poems fight emptiness by establishing hard, solid contexts.
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