About

Shirley J. Brewer graduated from careers in bartending, palm-reading and speech therapy. She serves as resident poet at Carver Center for the Arts in Towson, and on the board of Passager Books, a Baltimore-based small independent press for writers over 50.

 

She presents poetry workshops for Passager, and for Manor Mill in Monkton. Her award-winning poems garnish Barrow Street, Poetry East, Slant, Gargoyle, Chiron Review, Loch Raven Review, The Comstock Review, and many other journals/anthologies. Shirley’s books include A Little Breast Music (Passager, 2008), After Words, (Apprentice House Press, 2013), Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag, 2017), Wild Girls (Apprentice House Press, 2023), and Goddess of Swizzle (Apprentice House Press, 2026.)

 

Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, Shirley was a 2020 guest on The Poet and The Poem with Grace Cavalieri, former Maryland poet laureate, broadcast from the Library of Congress, where Shirley’s poems are now archived and – as part of the Lunar Codex program – are currently on the moon!

 

Shirley received the first-ever Creativity Award from the University of Baltimore, where she earned her Master’s in Creative Writing/Publishing Arts.

 

Her poem, “My Movie Monsters,” placed 3^rd in the 2025 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, sponsored by Smartish Pace.