Current Biography

Sharon Charde, a retired psychotherapist, has won Honorable Mention in contests sponsored by Maryland Poetry Review, the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation, and the 2004 Al Savard Memorial Poetry Contest sponsored by the CT Poetry Society. She was a finalist in the 2001 and 2004 Comstock Review contests, and a Special Merit winner in the 2009 Comstock Review contest, as well as the 2003 Hill-Stead Museum’ Sunken Garden contest and has been nominated six times for the Pushcart Prize. She won third prize in a 2003 contest sponsored by the Ct. Poetry Society and first prize in Dallas Poets Community 2007 Contest along with two Finalists in the same contest, second prize in the 2008 Al Savard Memorial Poetry Competition, third prize in the 2009 CT Poetry Society and semi-finalist in the 2009 Naugatuck River Review Contest.

She is published in the Ct. River Review, Calyx, Comstock Review, The Homestead Review, Poeticas, Voices In Italian America, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Crosscurrents, The White Pelican Review, Caduceus, Illya’s Honey, Ping Pong, Common Ground Review, Long River Run, The Paterson Literary Review, Touch, A Journal Of Healing, Chickenpinata and the Naugatuck River Review, as well as several anthologies, and has edited an anthology of poetry, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, which won the 2005 PASS (Prevention For A Safer Society) award in literature by The National Council On Crime And Delinquency in Oakland, CA. Her chapbook, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail , won first prize in the Flume Press (California State University) competition and was published in the fall of 2005. A second chapbook, Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto , won the Dallas Community Poets Contest in 2006 and was published in December. Her full-length collection, Branch In His Hand , was published by Backwaters Press in November 2008.

In 2005 she was presented with the first Litchfield Country Inge Morath Award, for her creativity and the significant impact she has had on social development in the arts. In April of 2007 she received the “Making A Difference For Women Award” from the Soroptimist organization, Waterbury CT Chapter, for her work with the young women of Touchstone. In 2006 she was invited by Trinity University in Washington DC to be the second annual Sower’s Seed Lecturer (an invitation extended to alumnae who have distinguished themselves by working in social outreach careers), and has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont in 2007 and 2008, where she received partial fellowship awards for both years. In July 2009 the Touchstone residential treatment facility in Litchfield CT where she has volunteered for ten years dedicated “The Sharon Charde Poetry Garden” in her honor. In 2010 she received a month’s full fellowship to the Virginia Center for The Creative Arts. She had led women’s writing groups and retreats in Lakeville, CT and Block Island, RI since 1990, and has worked since 1999 as a volunteer at Touchstone, a residential treatment center for adjudicated teenaged girls in Litchfield, CT, as well as The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville.