Sharon Mesmer

Sharon Mesmer (born in Chicago, Illinois) is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997, published to coincide with a month-long reading tour of Japan sponsored by American Book Jam magazine). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation by Daniel Bismuth, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism (or mesmerism) and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.

Mesmer, the daughter of second-generation Polish and German immigrants, was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The area, named for its proximity to the infamous , was the subject of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle. Her first published works were articles on being a disaffected teenage punk which appeared in the seminal Chicago punk ‘zine the Gabba Gabba Gazette while she was a student at St. Joseph High School. Her first published poems were “The Nordic Skull In Double Exposure” which appeared in Maureen Owen’s New York-based literary magazine, Telephone and “The Anger of Animals” appeared in Intro 12, a magazine of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Mesmer received a B.A. in Writing/English from Columbia College, where she and other female students of the poet Paul Hoover, notably Lydia Tomkiw and Deborah Pintonelli, became instrumental in galvanizing the links between the Chicago poetry and punk music scenes (other prominent local poets at that time included Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala). Mesmer, Pintonelli and poet Connie Deanovich published the literary magazine B City, and later Mesmer, Pintonelli and poet/fiction writer Carl Watson published the broadsheet letter eX. They were frequent readers at the Get Me High Lounge in the Wicker Park area of Chicago, and early poetry slam competitors (Mesmer was later a slam semi-finalist at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York).

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