SHARON POPPEN

Author

About Sharon

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, URL.

And 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.

The URL 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 two 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 ezines.

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.  Read a chapter of her novel 'After the War, Before the Peace' at  www.xlibris.com .  She has on an e-book, Hannah that can be reviewed at Virtual Tales.

Both books are also available at most online booksellers like Amazon.com

She's a member of the Lake Havasu City Writer's Group www.havasuwriters.com

and http://lhcwriters.ning.com/profile/SharonPoppen .  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.

Read an interview with Sharon.

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