Sharon White
If The Owl Calls
If the Owl Calls is a moving literary mystery set in late 1970s Norway, expertly weaving historical facts, cultural heritage, and gripping fiction. Rich in vivid detail, Sharon White crafts a compelling narrative that immerses readers in its atmospheric world.
Forthcoming from Betty, an imprint of WTAW Press, the novel will be released in November 2025.
Minato Sketches
Gigi, an art historian, wants to regain control over her life after her stroke. She leaves her husband and sons in the United States to teach art history for the summer at a university in Tokyo, where she once fell in love. As Gigi explores the unfamiliar landscape in Japan —shimmering temple gardens, a monkey preserve, and a Super Mario go-cart tour — she feels renewed. But when her friendship with Richard, a colleague who abandoned his family years before to teach dance in Japan, becomes an obsession with seeing wild boars in the exclusion zone of the Fukushima Disaster, she discovers her recovery is part of the fabric of loss and rebirth.
“Sharon White’s writing is gorgeous. The sentences are lyrical and assured at the same time. I especially like the descriptions and observations of the natural world—the shimmering rice fields, the wisteria and pink blossoms. Almost every page gives the reader a beautiful image to savor, whether it’s a persimmon or an orchid or something grander, like a park or garden or mountain. minato sketches is an impressive debut.”
— Ann Hood, New York Times best-selling author of The Stolen Child
The Body Is Burden And Delight
At the intersection of poetry and prose, Sharon White's The Body Is Burden and Delight examines ecological communities in fragile northern landscapes, and in the geography of the poet's daily life. Moving from Denmark and Sweden, to Lithuania, Shetland, and Wales, White explores the inner landscape of myth and dreams inspired by a deep connection to the earth, and the beauty and loss inherent in those ecosystems.
"Sharon White finds a mystical space, the top of the world, where there is snow, a mountain village, icy running water. Then she populates it. . . . This is a book filled with wit and wonder, ‘how,’ White says, ‘the Arctic must be melting, from the bottom up,’ with all that moves under the ice of knowing.”
—Elaine Terranova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter and Dollhouse
“The Body Is Burden and Delight is body and all its elements traveling at the speed of light and orienting on the compass of a word—to make every poet jealous, or to generously give us a guide by which to climb the lattice of details and yearning.”
—Peter Money, author of American Drone: New and Select Poems
“You can find yourself anywhere on earth in this book, and the message is the same. The landscape has its own story. This poet takes on the powers of Eve to rewild all of it.”
—Karen Donovan, author of Monad+Monadnock
Boiling Lake: On Voyage
The very short stories in Boiling Lake: On Voyage inhabit the voices of travelers from the past, present, future — and other worlds. The tales take their language from exploration narratives and the terrain of the heart. Written with the authority and inventiveness of an award-winning poet, these tales challenge and unsettle the reader just as foreign landscapes force us to reexamine our identity in the world.
“With mad singing in strange lands and familiar places, these tiny stories speak a language of dark lyricism. Unleashing the unconscious, White dares to venture through a tapestry of nightmare memories to illuminate strange moments of reality bordered by pure beauty. The book flies fast and free on the wings of words lit by the light on the moon.”
—Aimee Parkison, author of The Petals of Your Eyes
Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia
New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home.
In one section of the book, White tours the gardens of colonial botanist John Bartram; his wife, Ann; and their son, writer and naturalist William. Other chapters focus on Deborah Logan, who kept a record of her life on a large farm in the late eighteenth century, and Mary Gibson Henry, twentieth-century botanist, plant collector, and namesake of the lily Hymenocallis henryae. Throughout White weaves passages from diaries, letters, and memoirs from significant Philadephia gardeners into her own striking prose, transforming each place she examines into a palimpsest of the underlying earth and the human landscapes layered over it.
White gives a surprising portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia and of the ways that gardening can connect nature to urban space. She shows that although gardens may vanish forever, the meaning and solace inherent in the act of gardening are always waiting to be discovered anew.
"I know of no book about gardens that comes close to the beauty of Sharon White's Vanished Gardens. Her lyrical prose moves effortlessly through the centuries, through the stories and histories of people and flowers, of rivers and plants. Stunning work."
—Lisa Couturier, author of The Hopes of Snakes & Other Tales from the Urban Landscape
"Vanished Gardens is an evocative walk through the Piedmont's intertwined human and natural history."
—Ted Kerasote, author of Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog
"A thorough and thoughtful look at the evolution of Philadelphia gardens . . . The chronology of the growth and later descent of gardens in the city will charm all, especially residents. Overall, White's book is an insightful study in to the area's environmental history and the fascinating life of one of the city's most celebrated families."
—South Philly Review
"[White] does a beautiful job with fostering a clipped, elliptical, oblique texture. Evocative, but never goopy."
—Lord Whimsy, Live Journal
Eve & Her Apple
Poetry.
"Sharon White has the remarkable talent of weaving the various times that poetry can summon—moments, histories of eras, seasons, human recollections, botanical cycles, even geology—into effortless wholes. The poems reverberate with the feeling that comes from deep observation and deep caring. That makes them precious in the fullest sense—not rare and self-conscious but shining with their own light"
—Baron Wormser.
Field Notes : A Geography of Mourning
Mourning finds cadence in the natural world. The ebb and flow of grief-at once disorienting and reassuring-form the landscape of Sharon White's exquisitely written memoir of loss and eventual renewal. Field Notes is White's map back to finding herself following the untimely death of her young husband. She rediscovers her bearings amid the everyday drama of nature-the shadowy company of a moose, an unbridled chorus of crows, the persistence of a young family of raccoons. "These animals cheer me, so determined and knowing as they go from one task to another. A map of the territory in their animal brains. They know what they're here for," she observes. "After Steve's death, I lost that sense of orientation. I wasn't sure anymore who I was."Her journey through loss will resonate with individuals experiencing grief, providing inspiration and reassurance along the way.
Bone House
Bone House is Sharon’s debut poetry collection, offering a deeply evocative exploration of emotions. From moments of joy to profound sorrow, these poems take readers on a journey through the full spectrum of human experience, promising to move, inspire, and resonate long after the final page.