June 2 - Dr. Sharon Hamilton – “A Rotten Apple Joins the Literary Arts Club”
Most of us don’t remember joining the literary arts club but everyone reading this announcement is a member. Sharon Hamilton, labelled borderline autistic, potentially sociopathic, and ‘a real bad apple’ by the time she was three years old, was predicted to be uneducable, possibly trainable, likely to be institutionalized most of her life. Having defied those expectations, Hamilton will describe her entry into the land of literature and will show how reading and writing transformed the kicking, biting, swearing, and outraged three-year old she was into someone who thinks, works, behaves and looks much like the rest of us.
Sharon Hamilton was born, raised, and educated in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has taught at every grade level in the public school system, with a focus primarily on English and Drama. After eighteen years of teaching, with a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, she earned a PhD in language and literacy at the University of London (UK) and began her twenty-one-year second career as an English Professor at Indiana University in Indianapolis.
She retired to England in 2008, to the English Riviera, a picturesque seascape, and the birthplace of Agatha Christie. Nearing the age of 70, she began writing her first novel. After seven years in the UK, Hamilton returned to her birthplace in Winnipeg, where she lives with her partner and two shelties. She has one son, an actor and playwright, who lives in Toronto.
Hamilton’s books include the following:
Fiction
Fall of a Sparrow
Chapel on the Moor
Doolally Gang
Manitoba MAID
Better Dead Than Bred
Non-Fiction
My Name’s Not Susie: A Life Transformed By Literacy (Memoir)