When the medicine man of her Northern Cheyenne tribe met Sheree, he named her Many Trails Many Roads Woman. In fitting with her name, she embraces the multiple paths she travels in her personal and professional life.
Sheree grew up in Montana, the daughter of state politicians. Starting when she was ten years old, Sheree worked on the sidelines of the House of Representatives after school filing bills or delivering messages for legislators while listening to debate. At thirteen, she penned her first marketing copy when she developed her father’s campaign slogan. When she was a junior in high school, she wrote columns about the political process for her high school paper while managing the legislative message center. At seventeen, she gave speeches and wrote press releases during her father’s gubernatorial run.
After attending Vassar College and graduating with a degree in psychology, Sheree chose to first pursue a marketing career. She managed design of the Nesquik bottle as well as branding and graphics for forty-six other product lines while working in package communications for Nestle. Next, as one of the founding employees at IN Marketing Services, she held leadership positions of increasing responsibility and served as president of an operating company during the agency’s rapid rise from startup to the largest U.S. retail promotions agency. (More about her achievements while overseeing development and analysis of 2000 marketing programs and a 1200-person team can be found HERE.)
But eventually, Sheree wanted to pursue other professional paths. She left the agency world and worked as a speaker, trainer, and sales and marketing consultant while launching the San Francisco chapter of Startup Leadership program and obtaining her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She provided partnership marketing support for cancer research giant MD Anderson at the University of Texas before taking a full-time writing position in Health Science Advancement at University of California–San Diego. In March 2020, she became Executive Communications Officer for the Chancellor’s office at University of California–Riverside.
In 2018, Sheree began submitting her literary work to journals and magazines. In her first year of publishing, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won Submittable’s Eliza So Fellowship, placed in Midway Journal’s flash prose and poetry contest, placed in Beecher’s nonfiction contest, and received several other finalist honors. Since then, her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Passages North, AWP Writer’s Notebook, The Sun’s “Reader’s Write,” Storm Cellar, Memoir Magazine, Linea, Mom Egg Review, and the Cargo Literary blog. Her creative work and essays about writing have also appeared in Midway Journal, *82 Review, Past Ten, Wanderlust: A Narrative Map, and on the Submittable blog. She’s published journalism in the Orange County Register, advice columns for Savvy Auntie, and conference reports for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Sheree is currently completing a memoir about her relationship with her body and recovery from food addiction as well as a collection of literary travel reflections.
Now, back to that wandering spirit…
Beyond her professional endeavors, Sheree travels frequently to expand her knowledge of the world and its people. She’s visited 49 of the 50 states, much of which she saw while driving an RV through the South in the middle of summer with her mother. She was once engaged to a man that she met on an escalator in the Louvre. She also visited England to research the mystery of a missing couple while working on a project with a writing partner. She’s still surprised by what she discovered. Sheree currently lives in Southern California.