In 1978, her poem “Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening” won the Academy of American Poets Award.
At the time of her death, Sherwood was enrolled as a graduate student at Northridge and was employed there as a teacher of English composition.
Poet David Trinidad also created Sherwood Press in her honor and published (in collaboration with Greg Boyd's Yarmouth Press) a book of Rachel Sherwood's poems, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening, in 1981.
Reviewing Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Peter Clothier praised Sherwood's “attentive eye and sharp ear for language” and pointed out that, given the circumstance of her death, “the prescience of her vision is disquietingly accurate in several of these poems.” One such poem, “The Usual,” concludes: “it’s the usual: spilt liquor, / broken dishes, wrecked cars.” In his introduction to the book, Arthur Lane noted that Sherwood's “wit was mordant—properly so, given the time and place of her maturing, Los Angeles in the 1970’s.
Her appetite for life was fit for any Regency circle, though it was protected by an irony as vigilant as it was sharp-edged.” Lane also wrote that “below the balancing act that these poems carry off so well wait serious nightmares: madness, horror, the systematic brutality of the late twentieth century.