The 2005 Association of Teaching Artists’ Teaching Artist Distinguished Service to The Arts In Education Field Award honors Sherry Robbins. The Award was created in 2002 to honor individual artist educators who not only pioneered the Arts In Education Field, but who also continue to define the best of what it means to be a Teaching Artist. This award is the first in the nation to recognize artist educators for service to the Arts In Education field.  

Sherry Robbins is a poet, Teaching Artist, and free-lance writer. She has conducted creative writing workshops throughout New York State and abroad since 1977. Sherry Robbins is the Western New York coordinator for Alternative Literary Programs in the Schools (ALPS), the resident writer at Gay and Lesbian Youth Services of Western New York, and the project coordinator and Teaching Artist for several long-term Empire State Partnership residencies. She is currently an Arts in Education consultant for the University of Coimbra in Portugal and for Portugal’s Belgais Center for the Study of Arts.

Sherry Robbins has published two books of poetry, Snapshots of Paradise and Or, the Whale, as well as dozens of poems published in literary journals and anthologies here and in Spain and Portugal. She was the 1982 recipient of a New York State Creative Artist Public Service Award. She has just finished a book, The Accidental Poet, written with fellow Teaching Artist Susan Hannen, of one hundred creative writing exercises. The bi-lingual edition of The Accidental Poet is being published in Portugal this year. Before 2005 year is over, she will have her M.A. in the poetics of ecstasy, and her yoga teaching certification.

Click here to read Sherry Robbins Acceptance Speech