Shavawn M. Berry’s first book, Evanescent Creature: Poems & Meditations, was published on March 28, 2023, by Golden Dragonfly Press in Amherst, MA. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Golden Dragonfly Press’s, Goddess, Sable Books’ anthology, Red Sky – Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women, The Urban Howl, Trickster Literary Journal, The Huffington Post (HuffPo 50), elephant journal, The Anjana Network, The Good Men Project, Rebelle Society, Be You Media Group, Olentangy Review, Journey of Heart: Women’s Spiritual Poetry, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Vagina – The Zine, The Cancer Poetry Project 2, Kinema Poetics, Kalliope, Poet Lore, California Quarterly, Westview – A Journal of Western Oklahoma, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, North Atlantic Review, Concho River Review, Synapse, Living Buddhism, The World Tribune,  Blue Mountain Arts/SPS, and Poetry Seattle, to name just a few. She’s been writing about spiritual topics for more than twenty years and has been a practicing Buddhist for the past 38 years. In addition to The Wonderland Files, she has been a contributor to The Urban Howl,  Rebelle Society, and Be You Media Group.

In 1998, she received her Master’s degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where she specialized in Creative Nonfiction and Memoirs.  In 2014-2015, she worked as a co-coordinator for The Pen Project at Arizona State University, mentoring student interns in giving critical and creative advice to incarcerated writers in Arizona and New Mexico. From 2015 through 2019, she was the Creative Nonfiction Editor of Iron City, a literary magazine featuring work from incarcerated writers from throughout the U.S. From 2009 – 2014 she was the managing editor of an online magazine, Kalliope, featuring new writers and providing internships for college students in writing, desktop publishing, and editing.  In addition to her work as a writer, she is an award-winning teacher, teaching a variety of college writing courses full-time at a university in the desert Southwest, as well as creative writing workshops in memoir, spiritual writing, and healing writing. She also works with writers on an individual basis doing one-to-one creativity coaching, as well as editing and reviewing work.

She can be reached via her website, http://www.shavawnmberry.com/, or her page on Facebook. 

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The images used for TWF are pulled from images on Google and elsewhere.  Where there is a credit for the image, it is noted.  If The Wonderland Files has used an image that you don’t want to see on the site, please contact us and we will remove it. We don’t want to violate anyone’s copyright; Shavawn simply uses images that ‘speak’ to her to illustrate the ideas in her pieces.