Kerry E Sherin WrightDirector, Writers House, Teaching Professor of English, Co-Director of the Creativity & Innovation Initiative
Dr. Kerry Sherin Wright is the founding director of the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House and a Senior Teaching Professor of English at Franklin & 草榴社区. Her research interests include creative writing, poetry, and American comics and graphic literature, and she writes and publishes poems, essays, and reviews. Wright's creative work also includes public literary art projects, including The Magnetic Poetry Wall (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), Poets in the News (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), and (with artists Craig Welsh and Heidi Leitzke) Poetry Rolls (Lancaster, PA, 2017). In 2008, Wright received a $250,000 grant to found Poetry Paths, an ongoing poetry and public art project in Lancaster, Pa. from 2009-2017, Poetry Paths offered poetry writing workshops and enrichment activities for hundreds of elementary school students throughout the city, and worked with local residents and community centers to commission and install twelve pieces of original art featuring poems--sculpture, street furniture, and murals--in all four quadrants of the city.
From 1997-2003, Wright served as the first director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Upon her departure, she was honored with the creation of the 鈥淜erry Prize,鈥� an annual award given to a member of the writing community at Penn whose proposed project (in the language of the award) 鈥渂est captures the aesthetic capaciousness and literary communitarianism that is a founding idea of the Writers House and the hallmark of Kerry's work as director.鈥�
At F&M, she also served from 2017-2021 as co-director of the Provost鈥檚 Office's Creativity, Innovation, & the Future of Work Initiative. This project aimed to empower students to put their liberal arts education into action to foster positive change in the real world.
Wright lives with her husband in Lancaster, PA.