photo credit: Heather Mull
Autumn House Press published Sherrie’s second story collection Thank Your Lucky Stars in September 2018. Steve Almonds says, “Sherrie Flick is, like every great writer, a sublime noticer. The rich bounty of stories in Thank Your Lucky Stars is a testament to the raw power of her attention, her imagination, and her compassion.”
Sherrie Flick published her debut novel Reconsidering Happiness with Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press as part of their Flyover Fiction series in 2009. It was a semi-finalist for the VCU First Novelist Award. Chuck Kinder called it “A big beautiful Buick of a book.” She is also author of the award-winning flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume, 2004). John McNally warned, “These are late-night stories, told after midnight, a femme fatale whispering sad and unraveled and lusty tales into your ear.”
Her debut story collection, Whiskey, Etc. (Autumn House Press) was a Foreword INDIES bronze prize winner for best short story collection of 2016, an Entropy Best Fiction Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Phillip McMath Post-Publication Award and Eric Hoffer Award. Kathy Fish praised Whiskey, Etc. as “a sharp-edged, intelligent, brilliantly written collection of short shorts by a writer at the top of her game.”
Anthology publications include: Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze ; The Best Small Fictions 2017 ; Short on Sugar High on Honey: Micro Love Stories; Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story; Flashed: Sudden Stories in Prose and Comics; New Micro; Sudden Fiction; Flash Fiction Forward; and Flash Fiction Funny. Her essay “Flash in a Pan” appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.
Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares , Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Quarterly West, Quarter After Eight, Puerto del Sol, Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly , The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Wigleaf, Passages North, and Booth, among others.
Sherrie has been a regular contributor to Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine for which she received a Golden Quill Award from the Western Pennsylvania Press Club; her essays have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Creative Nonfiction, Ploughshares, Superstition Review and Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: Midwestern Writers on Food.
She has received artist residencies from the The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Ucross Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Other honors include a “Writing Pittsburgh” fellowship from Creative Nonfiction, an individual artist fellowship from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, multiple PA Partners in the Arts grants, a two-year Arts Experience Initiative grant from the Heinz Endowments, and an Artistic Vibrancy Award from The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council as well as two City of Pittsburgh Proclamations for her work in the literary community. In 2006, she was honored as one of Pittsburgh’s “40 under 40.”
Over the years, Sherrie has led interdisciplinary writing workshops in many arts institutions and nontraditional sites, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Alloy 26.
For ten years, Sherrie served as artistic director and co-founder of the Gist Street Reading Series. For six years, she worked as Associate Curator of Education at the Frick Art & Historical Center. For five years, she was Assistant Editor of Western Pennsylvania History magazine at the Heinz History Center. For three years she co-directed The Chautauqua Writers’ Festival with Phil Terman and Lori Jakiela. She has also worked as a professional baker in both New Hampshire and California.
Right now, she is co-editor with James Thomas and John Dufresne for Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, February 2023), a senior lecturer in Chatham University’s MFA and Food Studies programs, a manuscript consultant at Randolph Lundine, an urban garden monthly columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and a freelance writer and copy editor. Sherrie lives on the South Side Slopes of Pittsburgh with her husband, Rick Schweikert, and their dog, Jo-Jo. She is at work on a new short story collection and a narrative nonfiction manuscript, which explores place and displacement in Southwestern Pennsylvania.