Sharon Mesmer (born in 1960) is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing.
Mesmer, the daughter of second-generation Polish and German immigrants, was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.
in Writing/English from Columbia College, where she and other female students of the poet Paul Hoover, notably Lydia Tomkiw and Deborah Pintonelli, became instrumental in galvanizing the links between the Chicago poetry and punk music scenes (other prominent local poets at that time included Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala).
After Mesmer left Chicago for New York, she became a student of Allen Ginsberg in the Brooklyn College MFA poetry program.
Through Ginsberg's nomination, she was awarded a MacArthur Scholarship (given through the college from a gift by John Ashbery) and represented the college in the Poetry Society of America's “Best of New York Writing Programs.” Writing about Mesmer's first book, Half Angel, Half Lunch, Ginsberg characterized her work as “always interesting, beautifully bold and vivaciously modern.”[2] It was through the poet that Mesmer was introduced to Buddhist practice.