Frances Sherwood


Frances Sherwood is an American writer, novelist, and educator. Sherwood has published four novels and one book of short stories. Her 1992 novel, Vindication, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been translated into twelve languages.

Biography

Born June 4, 1940, in Washington, DC, and raised in Monterey, California, Sherwood is the daughter of William and Barbara Sherwood. She is married to photographer Fred Slaski. Sherwood has three children from a previous marriage to Reynold Madoo. Reynold Madoo is from Trinidad and was a student with her at Howard University in the early 1960's. They were married for over 20 years.
Sherwood attended Howard University in the early 1960s on an Agnes and Eugene Meyer Scholarship before earning her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1967. She then pursued graduate study at New York University. She earned an M.A. in creative writing at The Johns Hopkins University in 1975. She continued the study of fiction writing at Stanford University after winning a Stegner Fellowship in 1976.
Sherwood’s first book-length publication was a short story collection, Everything You’ve Heard Is True. Since then, she has published four novels: Vindication, Green, The Book of Splendor and Night of Sorrows. Sherwood has had two stories included in O. Henry Award collections and one story in The Best American Short Stories. Twenty-four of her short stories have been published in magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope, and TriQuarterly. "Basil the Dog" was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1999.
In 1986, Sherwood was hired as an assistant professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where she taught creative writing and journalism. She was promoted to professor of English in 1994.
Frances Sherwood has said that she considers herself a “new historical” novelist, a writer who displaces current political and psychological issues onto earlier times and exotic locales.

Novels