Sholl was one the founding members of Alice James Books, a non-profit publishing house at the University of Maine at Farmington, established in 1973 with the intent of widening women's access to publishing.
[3][4] Sholl published her first three poetry collections with Alice James Books: Changing Faces (1974), Appalachian Winter (1978) and Rooms Overhead (1986).
[8] The National Endowment for the Arts gave Sholl an artist fellowship in 1994.
[3] In 1997, Sholl's collection Don't Explain was selected by Rita Dove to receive the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry.
[9] Dove, a previous holder of the position of US Poet Laureate,[10] described Sholl's poems as "what narrative can aspire to – namely, the grace and ease of the lyric rhapsody".