Sharon Bippus is an award-winning writer with more than 20 publications to her name. She is an administrator of the Kalamazoo Writers Disorganization. Her short story collection, “This Blue Earth,” won the 2023 Michigan Writers chapbook competition in the area of fiction, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
“I like to write stories that are surprising, a little off kilter,” Bippus says.
Her nominated story is about a woman with three legs. Winning at very least a Pushcart nomination had been a lifelong goal.
“The Pushcart has a large anthology that comes out every year,” she says. “I diligently purchased it, I look through the stories, I see what literary journals are sending stories. I had often sent my stories to those specific journals… it’s always been my dream even just to be nominated.”
Finally earning the nomination, Bippus says, “It just made me feel like a writer with a capital W. It is kind of weird, but we need people outside of us to validate us. We don’t live in a little fishbowl.”
Bippus didn’t stop at earning validation for herself. When Kalamazoo author Bonnie Jo Campbell asked her to become administrator of a group of area writers, the Kalamazoo Writers Disorganization, Bippus cheerfully took on the role.
“I do really like helping other writers,” she says. “Kalamazoo Writers Disorganization is about two years old. It was the brainchild of Bonnie Jo Campbell. It started with a Facebook page, Kalamazoo Writers. It was really her mission to somehow connect writers, because many writers would come to her and ask her, what do I do? How do I find a writers group? So Bonnie eventually asked me to become administrator of that page along with writer Elizabeth Kerlikowski. A few months into that, someone nudged us to have an in-person meeting.”
With that, the group began to meet the first Tuesday of every month, September through May, in the Van Deusen Room at the Kalamazoo Public Library, downtown Kalamazoo. Speakers frequently come to the meetings to address various literary topics such as how to get published, how to market books, how to become a ghost writer, and other similar topics. Outside of meetings, writers continue to communicate on the Facebook page.
Bippus lives in Three Rivers and is currently at work on a novel.
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