Summer 2022

Summer started without me this year. After a once in a lifetime trip with my sister and 92-year-old grandmother, I tested positive for Covid-19 on our way back into the states. Just ten days before they lifted mandatory reentry testing! Summer break was in full swing when I returned home, but it took me a few weeks to “be back.” Hello, Summer. What other adventures do you have waiting for me?

Listen to my interview with Peter Vankevich of WOVV 90.1 FM, Ocracoke’s Village Voice.

Anything That Happens

“I don’t know that I have ever heard of a book of poetry being called a page-turner, but I opened it when it arrived in the mail, expecting to just take a quick peek and read the rest as I had more time, and ended up sitting down and devouring it. Just gorgeous”

—More reviews at Goodreads

Upcoming Events

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Carolina Mountains Literary Festival

Reading and Discussion – Anything That Happens

What is it like to write about your most shameful experience? Cheryl Wilder will read from her debut collection, Anything That Happens, an examination of what it takes to reconcile a past grave mistake. She will discuss the role of trust in writing and how craft helped build the writer-reader relationship.

September 9, 2022, 11-11:45 AM
Plot Hound Books
102 West Main Street
Burnsville, NC 28714

September 10, 2022, 10-10:45 AM
First Baptist Church
51 Town Square
Burnsville, NC 28714

From the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival website: “Our mission is to bring together, in small, intimate settings, authors, readers of all ages, novice writers, listeners, and learners. We are a festival of readers who appreciate discussing the ideas in literature.”

Good News

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Anything That Happens
Second Finalist
Poetry Society of Virginia
2022 North American Book Award

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“Anything That Happens is a mature poetic inquiry into the ways early trauma can reverberate through the whole of a life—relationships, family, one’s sense of self. The poems are candid, sharp-edged and very well rendered. You can taste “the bone in the broth” here as Wilder works through the maze of emotion. In the end, we witness change and redemption, but the psychic weight remains. As she aptly describes it: ‘I am two people now— // the before and the after; one I’ve already forgotten, // the other I have not met.’” —Mark Cox, author of Readiness: Prose Poems