Gail Sher is a San Francisco area-based writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. She earned her B.A. in English from Northwestern University, received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin but chose instead to study middle English and (later) harpsichord at the University of California, Berkeley. She won a Teacher of the Year award from the combined education faculties of Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco State for her high school teaching of English. She completed her M.A. in Clinical Psychology at John F. Kennedy University and has been a practicing psychotherapist since 1991. In 1970 she was ordained as a lay disciple of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and her work as both a writer and a therapist is influenced by her training in Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Yoga. Since 1982, she has published over thirty books of poetry and three books on writing as a craft and a spiritual practice. The Gail Sher Collection includes both handwritten and typed manuscripts, correspondence between Sher and other poets and poet-editors, art, photographs, and documentation of her published work, including many journals in which her poetry has appeared.