User:SheriBooker

Sheri Booker
Sheri Booker is a writer, poet, educator, and author of the award-winning memoir, Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home. Essence says that she is a "sensational" writer who "colors in the lines of victims, and the guilty who leave behind heartbroken family."

She is the recipient of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for "Outstanding Literary Work for a Debut Author" and lives in her native Baltimore.

Works
Booker is the author of two books and a vook(video book). Her most recent book, Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home, a critically-acclaimed memoir about the near-decade she spent working at an inner-city funeral home in West Baltimore and the personal experiences both inside the business and in the world beyond that shaped her young womanhood.

Her other works are One Woman, One Hustle and the vook, I Am the Poem.
 * Nine Years Under(2013)
 * I Am The Poem (2009)
 * One Woman, One Hustle(2003)

Education
Booker graduated from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland with a B.A. in Political Science and received an MFA from Goucher College in Creative Nonfiction. She has lived and taught in the rural South, Africa and Baltimore.

Awards and Honors

 * 2014 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award- Nominated
 * 2014 Outstanding Literary Work Debut Author – NAACP Image Awards- Winner
 * 2014 Encouraged Educator Award
 * 2014 Dream Class Author with Barnes and Noble University Bookstores

Media
Booker has been featured by:
 * National Public Radio
 * The Word Network
 * Essence Magazine
 * Baltimore Magazine
 * The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home
“Alternately creepy and captivating, drawing readers in with the same you-can't-not-look quality of a highway crash. There will be some stiffs who just can't get past Booker's subject. Readers who do will find that her story is only partly about dead people. It's the living ones that make the book.”

–The Associated Press

“A darkly comic memoir of life and death in urban America.”

–Booklist(Starred Review)

“Booker’s descriptions of her experiences of loss, dating and coming of age are interesting, but it’s her revelations about the daily workings of a funeral home in a poor urban setting that are transfixing.”

–The New York Times Book Review

“[Booker’s] knack for detail, character descriptions, dialogue, and exposé of personal indiscretions make for a gritty, moving, and often funny read. . . .her insider's story manages to uplift and turn a glimpse of the dark side into a bright reveal of humanity.”

–Creative Loafing

“Fascinating…the perspective that Booker gained from her years dressing bodies is rare and valuable. She has cultivated a soft compassion and a hard sense of gallows humor, which, when correctly combined, can create great literature and a powerful sense of humanity.”

– Baltimore City Paper

“Booker beautifully captures her years as a mortician’s right-hand woman in her new memoir Nine Years Under, taking readers behind-the-scenes, explaining in vivid prose what happens in a place people only visit when they don’t want to be there. . . . Ultimately, the book is a love story, to a community, to an unsung yet heroic small business, and to her adopted family, particularly patriarch Albert Wylie, conduit to the great beyond.”

– Biographile.com

“Looking for something with a great plot? Something different, delightful, but a little dark? Then you need Nine Years Under. … This is a wonderful, wonderful book that sounds squirmy, yet is anything but. So grab Nine Years Under because if you think you’ll like it, you’re dead right.”

– Marco Eagle

“In Nine Years Under, Booker poetically infiltrates the private world of black funeral home culture. The book serves as a magic intersection of this mysterious mortuary milieu, the black church and middle class black Baltimore to spin a story that Booker is uniquely positioned to set to prose. You will laugh and cry; be horrified and hopeful. But at the end of a dark ride through valleys of suppressed emotion, every reader will realize that at the end of the darkest and most violent of rainless thunder storms, our own tears can set up rainbows of promise.”

-Jeff Johnson, author of Everything I'm Not Made Me Everything I Am

“Nine Years Under is a sparkling debut--- brimming with love and bursting with life. Booker's Baltimore is equal parts The Wire and The Cosby show. She doesn't shrink from the realities of life in an inner city funeral home, but she is also a loving witness, documenting the big hearted community that takes care of its own. Told with compassion, wit, and good old fashioned story telling, Sheri Booker gives us unforgettable characters who will make you laugh right up until they break your heart.”

-Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow

“In Nine Years Under, Sheri Booker has accomplished quite a feat. She somehow was able to bring a tremendous amount of light and life to a story about the strange and often dark business of death. For that, I applaud her.”

-Jason Reynolds''', co-author of My Name is Jason. Mine Too.'''

“You’ve never read a book like Nine Years Under. I fell in love with Sheri, a plucky and nervy teenager who took a risk that changed her life. Through love, laughter, and tears, Sheri takes you to a world many of us will never experience. And she does it with lively writing, awesome characters and a sharp sense of humor. Who knew the world of death was filled with so much life?”

-Aliya S. King, author of Diamond Life

Quotes
“Give me two deaf ears and a sign language manual, and I will start a revolution.”

Website

 * www.sheribooker.com

Links

 * Sheri Booker on NPR
 * Sheri Book in the New York Times
 * Sheri Book in the Miami Herald
 * Sheri Booker on BaltimoreStyle.com