Discipline: Literature

Stephen Barry Sherman

Discipline: Literature
Region: Hancock, NH
MacDowell Fellowships: 1971, 1972

Steve Sherman (1938-2024) was a writer, journalist, photographer, painter, musician, and nature lover. He was a raised in the Los Angeles, area and shared a passion for words and stories with his father, a Los Angeles Times Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist. Steve wrote both fiction and non-fiction in the forms of cookbooks, hiking guides, mysteries, adventure tales, and biographies, as well as thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. In the early 1970s he wanted to see, in his words, "Thoreau and Emerson country," and was accepted for his first MacDowell residency. During his second, in 1972, he met fellow writer and musician, Julia Older. At the end of their residencies, Steve proposed the two of them hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine and write about their adventures. They hiked the 2,119 miles together and remained a partnership until Julia's death in 2021. Their books, many written collaboratively, are a testament to their shared interests and fierce curiosity in art, nature, literature, poetry, cooking, New England, and more.

Studios

Star

Stephen Barry Sherman worked in the Star studio.

Funded by Alpha Chi Omega, a national fraternity founded in 1885, Star Studio — built in 1911–1912 — was the first studio given to the residency by an outside organization. To this day, Alpha Chi sorority pledges learn the story of Star Studio and its role in supporting American arts and letters. Beginning as a nicely proportioned…

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