About Sharon Emery

Sharon Emery has always had a penchant for communicating, but speaking is a struggle because her voice includes a stutter. Sometimes a bad one. So writing, via journalism, became her voice. To succeed she knew she had to be better – a lot better – than her peers. She went after the credentials (a degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University) and the work experience (three part-time journalism jobs as an undergrad, for starters) to help ensure that.

 

It took some doing, but Emery ultimately forged a career in not only journalism, but public relations and teaching. She still stutters, and now considers it her accent.

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Luckily, Emery's stutter taught her a lot about surviving life. And that skill was put to the test when she was faced with the deaths of her two younger siblings and her eldest daughter, Jessica, who had cognitive and neurological impairments and drowned at age 25.

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Emery is a former chair of the Michigan Disability Rights Coalition Board and considers equal rights for people with disabilities one of the nation's unfulfilled promises. She and her husband John Schneider, a former newspaper columnist, live in Michigan – on twelve acres near Lansing and on Lake Huron near Cheboygan. This is her first book.

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It wasn't always easy being her, but Emery is happy anyway.