S. Pearl Sharp

Tiptoe through the near dark apartment, rush my sleep stiff fingers to the keys before the thought
flies into mist with no return ticket. I am god in her garden with unscrubbed breath. On my right hand, typed and scribbled notes. On my left, munchies and water. Muses come just to dance with me. We wrap bells on our toes and get down to bizness. Sometimes to get to the light you gotta type in the dark. . .

S. Pearl Sharp works words, conjures vision. Her body of work focuses on cultural arts, Black history, health and healing, and the marriage of word with other art forms.

She reluctantly accepted publisher Glenn Thompson’s challenge to write Black Women For Beginners for the popular Writers and Readers’ For Beginners documentary comic book series. Released in 1993, and illustrated by Beverly Hawkins Hall, it is now in its 4th printing, (re-published by For Beginners LLC, distributed by Random House.) Her essays and commentaries have been heard on NPR and other broadcast outlets, and she worked with esteemed actress-director Beah Richards on her collection of essays, There's A Brown Girl In The Ring, later adapting them to stage. S. Pearl has recorded two poetry w/​jazz CDs, Higher Ground and On The Sharp Side.

During the 1960’s and early 70’s, Sharp was a part of New York City’s vibrant Black arts movement, where she studied under author John Oliver Killens, founded the performance group Poets & Performers, released her first two volumes of poetry, and wrote The Sistuhs, her first produced play.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1975, Sharp formed Poets Pay Rent, Too, publishing Robert Earl Price’s first collection of stories and poems, Blood Lines, and her 3rd volume of poetry, Soft Song, which includes art by eight prominent Black artists. In 1991, Harlem River Press re-printed Soft Song and published Sharp’s fourth collection of poems, Typing In The Dark. With the help of author Alex Haley and other industry leaders, Sharp published the first-of-its-kind 1980 Directory of Black Film/​TV Technicians, West Coast and The Black History Film List (1989). She served as Senior Editor for Juneteenth Audio Books/​Time-Warner where, with founder/​CEO Steve Williams, she co-produced and directed the first audio books by Susan L. Taylor, Bebe Moore Campbell and Ernest J. Gaines.

In 1991 she premiered Mixed Media Poems, a stage performance of her poetry with interpretations by jazz, dance and visual artists. The new century has produced Evolve, the adaptation of S. Pearl’s essay, “Pieces,” into a dance suite by Pat Taylor’s JazzAntiqua Dance and Music Ensemble (2010), writing and narrating The Little Rock 9, a half-hour live radio drama for donnie l betts' Destination Freedom, and Beyond November, a performance and exhibit series focused on political art, sponsored by Ed Pearl’s The Ashgrove.

An award-winning independent filmmaker, S. Pearl created the semi-animated narrative Picking Tribes; Life Is A Saxophone, on poet Kamau Daa'ood; and Back Inside Herself, a poetic short. For the City of Los Angeles' CH35 she wrote and directed numerous cultural arts documentaries, including Central Avenue Live!, L.A. to L.A. (Louisiana to Los Angeles) and Fertile Ground: Stories From The Watts Towers Arts Center. In 2004 she released The Healing Passage/​Voices From The Water, a feature documentary that addresses using the arts to heal from the residuals of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Healing Passage/​Voices. . . is currently airing on The Documentary Channel.

S. Pearl is a member of Los Angeles’ The World Stage and Back Porch Fiction Workshop, Black American Documentary Filmmakers, Hedgebrook Women Writers (Alum) and Women Make Movies.

Works-in-progress include Uncertain Rituals, an audio CD of short stories; The Evening News, a collection of essays; and Collecting Voices, the complete interviews with the artists and the-making-of stories from The Healing Passage.