THADRA SHERIDAN is a poet, essayist, columnist, teacher, and performer from Minneapolis, MN.  She has been published in the Star and Tribune, the Skyway News, Moxie Magazine, Rattle, and several anthologies. She has won awards for her writing from the Faulkner Society and the National League of American Pen Women. Her work has been featured on the final episode of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Minnesota Public Radio, UpWorthy, Button Poetry, and venues across the country, including San Quentin Penitentiary, where she scored serious points talking about her terrible taste in men. She has been a member of four National Poetry Slam Teams,  featured at ForWord Girls, the first ever all-female spoken word festival in San Francisco and won LA’s first all-female Redhots Slam. She was the recent recipient of the Jerome Foundation's Verve grant for spoken word, and writes a weekly column for the online Op-Ed magazine, Opine Season.  Thadra is currently working on a memoir and a series of humorous essays about contemporary culture.   If it has hurt, she will find a way to laugh at it.  She is snarky, clever as hell, and a little bit evil.  She charges for pity, and she's sick of waiting tables.

 

Thadra has performed at hundreds of colleges, high schools, juvenile detention centers, and badass venues across the country, from the Conga Room in LA to the Bowery in New York to the Walker Modern Art Center in Minneapolis.  Her scathing, hilarious, autobiographical work has won her countless poetry slams in dozens of cities, including Berkeley's coveted $1000 .  She is a two-time Minneapolis Grand Slam Champion, and coached the Berkeley Slam Team to 6th place at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX.

 

With a background in theater and stand-up comedy, Thadra is a seasoned and meticulously dynamic performer.  She has taught workshops in writing and performance in scores of colleges, high schools, libraries, community centers. She orchestrated a city-wide 3-month program in 8 Minneapolis community youth centers where she wrote the curriculum, trained the teachers, taught two workshops herself, and organized a final poetry slam at Minneapolis' acclaimed Walker Modern Art Museum.  She taught a 3-month residency in North Minneapolis' Patrick Henry High School's ESL program to a primarily Hmong and Liberian student body.  She runs yearly workshops at the National Poetry Slam in comedy and performance.  Her workshops have helped to form a formidible number of national champions.

 

She was a finalist for the Nation's annual prize for poetry, and reigns in Rattle's online top ten viewed poems of all time 7,  She can drink you under the table, and make you laugh your ass off while she does it.