Christy Shepard
POET | AUTHOR
About Christy
Christy Shepard writes poetry and prose. She published her first chapbook True North in 1998, and her work has appeared in publications including The MacGuffin, Persimmon Tree, Local Gems Press, the Bay Guardian, Littoral Press, Local Gems Press, and Celestial Arts Press. Her poem The Darkness Around Us is Deep was the winner of the 11th annual Littoral Press Broadside Contest, and she has won honorable mentions in The MacGuffin Magazine and Bay Guardian Poetry Contests. Her forthcoming book entitled, It’s All In Here Somewhere, published by Finishing Line Press is slated for release in early 2027.
Christy Shepard grew up in Minnesota and came to San Francisco in the early 70’s as a hippy, a feminist, and budding poet. She worked for over four decades in the social service world as both an RN and a psychotherapist - as a pediatric ICU nurse, on a crisis team, supervising adoption placements, and in the SF County Jails as a nurse and counselor.
After her many decades in the helping professions, she became an adoptive mother in her late 40’s, in her words “ever a late bloomer.” Her early experiences as an adoptive parent, as well as her deep love of the natural world, have shaped and infused her poetry. She is a long-time student of Kathleen McClung of The Writing Salon. She lives in Berkeley, CA, is partially retired, and is avid about partner dancing and pickleball. Her daughter Valentina lives close by.
BOOKS
It’s All Here Somewhere
In It’s All Here Somewhere, Christy Shepard offers a collection of poems that speak to the mysteries and messiness of daily life, as well as the challenge of staying present in the face of loss. She delights in the details of seasons, the weather, friendships, and snow. With humor and compassion, she covers the gamut from a girl’s first period, through reckoning with infertility, adoption, single parenting, love, to the uninvited ordeal of aging and the disappointments of the ever-changing body. Her midwestern sensibilities ground these poems in the ordinary with extraordinary clarity and affection.
Praise for "It's All Here Somewhere"
“It’s All Here Somewhere” by Christy Shepard explores the mysteries, heartaches, and, ultimately the joys and triumphs of a woman’s life from adolescence to old age, from infertility to adoption, from life to death. Shepard’s precise language will pierce your heart, even as you marvel at her skill at poetic form and compression. I will be turning to Shepard’s poems again and again. They are that good and that unforgettable. “It’s All Here Somewhere,” indeed.
----- Angie Minkin, author of “Balm for the Living and Lineage Songs” (forthcoming)
Christy Shepard paints with words. “Two sets of long underwear hang on the line / by a broken shack with blue shutters / a single sign of Siberian life.” Who wouldn’t read poetry like this? Shepard evokes the natural world while plumbing the depths of her interior life. I was riveted from start to finish by her book’s intensity, tenderness, and imagery.
----- Martina Reaves, author of “I’m Still Here”
In this luminous collection, Christy Shepard confides in us readers—as in, she entrusts to our safekeeping, our care and protection, tender yet incandescent poems of “a child insomniac who welcomed morning,” a mother who holds close a keening daughter all afternoon, a neighbor unscrewing a jar of olives despite his tremor. These exquisite poems span regions and seasons—Minnesota winter light outside a hospital, summer heat on a Mendocino dock, rainfall in Siberia, the Northern Lights over Vermont—and each one meditates eloquently on our complicated humanity, on “the nature of donation/who gives, who receives.” Savor again and again the gift of Christy Shepard’s wise and steady poems, quietly bracing revelations, all of them “small promises against the dark night.”
----- Kathleen McClung, author of “Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies” and “Questions of Buoyancy”
True North
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EVENTS
INFO TO COME
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