About

SharonPoppenEditedPhotoJan2014_colorBG_crop Sharon Poppen grew up in Chicago, Illinois.  She was raised by a loving grandmother in a house consisting of her mother, a younger brother, a grandfather, three teenage uncles and an aunt only nine years her senior. They were a wild and crazy, in a nice way, bunch that thrived in an atmosphere of caring and protective love.

 Sharon was a quiet child who loved playing paper dolls.  The neighborhood girls said they couldn’t play if Sharon wasn’t around, because she made up the best stories.  They’d play for hours in their own little version of soap opera sagas.  Even then, character development was what drove Sharon’s creativity.

By age fifteen, her mother had remarried and given birth to a sickly child forcing the family out of the cold Midwest winters into the sunny and bright Southern California coast where she graduated from high school.

Since then, she’s been an avid student of the University of Real Life. While it may not have been filled with wise professors and thick textbooks, it brought her into the world of decision-making, coping without a safety net and a look at the good, the bad, the beauty and the ugliness of human nature.

Her journey through the years has had her living for periods of time in Albuquerque, NM; Simi Valley, CA; Livermore, CA and finally to the wonderful Southwest desert of Lake Havasu City, AZ.  To pay her way she worked for a time at the University of New Mexico in the early days of the computer and campus unrest.  However, most of her working career was spent with the Pacific Bell Telephone Company from which she retired.  Retirement brought her the opportunity to travel and there are few states that she has not visited, including Alaska and Hawaii.

 Life also brought her a couple of husbands, two wonderful children, three delightful stepchildren and five darling grandchildren.
 During the years she was living through the URL, she was writing the great American novel.  It was done sporadically and late at night when the kids were asleep.  Then, with her retirement came the opportunity to go to a real college and she enrolled at the Mohave Community College.  Her professors began to comment on her writing ability.  Although she calls herself a novelist, Sharon’s first piece of writing to reach publication was a poem!

The characters that peopled the great American novel that she’d been writing all those years, began to speak louder and more often, until it became a daily ritual to sit down and write more of the story.  Professors encouraged her; she joined writer’s groups and began to submit her work to agents and publishers.

Now, it’s her life.  She writes every day.  Sharon has published five novels and has six more waiting to go into print.  She has penned over three hundred short stories that are widely published in both print anthologies and online e-zines.

 Sharon also shares her knowledge of writing by presenting workshops on journaling, self-publishing, character development, fiction writing and blogging at the local college and at various community centers for citizen enrichment classes.  She is now offering a class in flash fiction at Long Story Short Writing School at Colorado Free University – http://www.lssatcfu.org/Fiction.html .
 Sharon’s stories have won awards from the Arizona Authors Assoc., the National League of American Pen Women and Long Story Short.   She now has six published books. Click here to take a look.  

She’s a member of the Lake Havasu City Writer’s Group .  She is also a member of the Society of Southwestern Authors www.ssa-az.org  in Tucson, AZ.

 Her goals – write every day, publish as often as possible, enjoy life every moment.

 

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