Sherry Keith, Writer/Author : I’ve been writing one thing or another since childhood. As a teenager, I had ambitions to become a journalist, a technical writer, and a writer of fiction. As a “grown-up” I’ve managed to do a bit of each. Maybe I dreamed of being a writer because women authors were visible back in the 1950s, a time when women doctors, lawyers, mechanics, political leaders, engineers and chefs were not likely to be seen. Then I kept diaries and wrote some poetry. In college as a sociology major at UC Berkeley, I wrote my fair share of essays. I am forever thankful to the stellar public education focused on reading and writing available while I was growing up in California. .
When I moved to Jamaica, the world of colonialism and imperialism really woke me up. As a newly independent nation, Jamaica was asking all the fundamental questions about social and economic development. Bob Marley was singing, loud and clear about social justice as the backdrop to those times. In Jamaica I found a new trajectory: a pathway which took me on a writing journey, mostly technical and occasionally journalistic eventually leading to doctoral studies on International Development Education at Stanford University.
Working from the mid-1970s in academia and the world of international development policy where writing was fundamental to exposing, explaining and proposing solutions to pressing problems kept me at the typewriter and then the computer for decades. Since retiring from San Francisco State University where I was professor of social science and history, I have had the luxury of time to write about what I find most memorable and important . So far these recollections have been encapsulated in two memoirs and a novel. And there is more to come; stayed tune.
SHERRY KEITH: AUTHOR 