By Suzanne Seyfi, Staff Writer

Professor Amie Sharp is an award-winning poet and a PPCC English, Literature, and Creative Writing professor.

“I’ve been pretty fortunate, after, you know, years of toiling in obscurity. I’ve got some good fortune and some good recognition coming my way, so I’m really grateful for that,” Sharp said.

She encourages and mentors her students in order to pay forward the life-changing professors and mentors from her own studies.

“That’s what my professors did for me and so I’m very committed to passing that along. And I would also say, I’m very passionate about our Pikes Peak Community College students and the high quality of writing that I see from them… I think they’re in a position to really be able to discover their creative voice and that’s really important to me.”

“We have a wonderful legacy we’re building for the students here,” she said of former students whose works are now featured at various publications.

Each of these books contain at least one of her writings

Over 60 pieces of Sharp’s work have been published.

She has received the Best of the Net award from Burningword Literary Journal for her poem “Train at Night in the Desert” which was published in January. This ekphrastic poem was inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting of the same name.
She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

This past summer, Sharp also claimed Artist-In-Residence at the SabinARTi Cultural Association in Casaprota, Italy. This award allowed her to spend a month in Italy with three other artists: Elia, a Brazilian painter, and Gey Pin and Ranice, two performers from Singapore.

Six of Sharp’s poems were translated from English into Italian for a presentation to the Casaprota community. “We had a reading where there was an actor – another actor, not [the Singaporean performers] – and he would read the Italian translation and I would read the English, so everyone in the audience would get the poetry. Many of them spoke English, but I have to say, poetry sounds wonderful in Italian,” Sharp said.

About the interplay of teaching poetry and writing poetry, Sharp said, “I think it’s so intertwined. I really can’t imagine one without the other, right? Because I think when I’m teaching poetry, I’m a better poet, and I’m writing more poetry than when I’m not. And that experience, it certainly informs my teaching and then I think helping to mentor others – writers and students – makes me more excited about poetry.”

She is a participant in four different writing groups: Poetry West, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, her Seattle Pacific University MFA alumni community, and the (staff-only) PPCC Creative Writers Group led by Assistant Professor Brook Bhagat.

“This group Ms. Bhagat has established has been very supportive for people from all over the college, who work for the college, who want to work on their creative writing,” Sharp said.