Sherry Weaver Smith writes poems inspired by walking through grasslands of the American West, revisiting memories of Asian travels, and talking with her eight-year-old daughter, Laura. Her poems have been published in the Arizona Literary Magazine, To Topos: Poetry International, California Quarterly, The Heron's Nest, and the Seventh Quarry (U.K.), and one of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008. She is one of the American voices that responded to the paintings of Vietnamese children in the Speak Peace exhibit, a mixture of art and poems, which has been showcased at various universities in the United States, England, and ultimately in Vietnam.
Sherry is Grants Manager for Science Buddies, an educational nonprofit. Previously, she worked in product management for a healthcare software company. Earlier in her career, she worked for a foundation assisting street children in Manila, the Philippines, and for an English language school in Japan—experiences that still inspire her poetry today. She has an M.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford in England and a B.A. from Duke University. She was born in the quaint, university town of Athens, Ohio, but she grew up in Northern Virginia, where her father, Kelly Weaver, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and her mother, Cheryl Weaver, taught third grade.
Sherry's current favorite hobby is bird watching, including reacting to Rare Bird Alerts and convincing her family to try to find birds that most often have long since flown away to escape the interested crowds. She also enjoys traveling and finding "hidden" points of interest, such as a ruined village only visible from the top of a hill or petroglyphs found down a dirt road. Snowshoeing, attempting to write fiction for children, and hiking round out Sherry's hobbies that she enjoys with her daughter, Laura, and husband, Michael.