Sheryl Mebane's life as a writer, musician, and chemist are on target. Visit her site to learn the details.

Lady Bird
by Sheryl Mebane
201 pages
Online Price $10.00
Shipping and Handling within the US $2.00
ISBN # 0-9673867-8-0
Excerpt
Author's Column
About the Book
About the Author
About the Music

Click here to order online in the US:

From Lady Bird : "A harmonica moaned, reaching deep inside. Down-home bass throbbed from the radio to her chest. Honey locked into the steady pulse, released into its space, exhaled."

With one breath, a story of three women begins in word and sound. Honey, a songbird of rare quality, soars out of segregated Eastern North Carolina only to face deep betrayal and the high price of her talent. Her daughter Passion writhes under Honey’s shadow, taking dangerous turns to avoid the musical salvation that is her birthright. At a desperate time, a straight-laced stranger named Freida enters Passion’s world and becomes, in one afternoon in Brooklyn , the chance for peace that Honey defies death to seize. In the final section, “Naming thunder and wind,” Freida’s past threatens Honey’s supernatural intervention in a struggle for Freida’s identity and her newly freed heart.
Through the power of the women’s tales, the novel follows the fourth central character, the music. Each chapter is a song, building into three sets that form the lyric soul of the women’s lives, tracing the legacy of the music with the complexity and varied pace of jazz.

__________________________________________________________

      Sheryl’s life has been marked by the ebb and flow of three main pursuits: music, writing and chemistry. Sheryl Mebane was born and grew up in North Carolina he has two older sisters and both her parents are retired high school science teachers. Early in school, she seized upon revelations of the mysteries of music, which gave her a sense of the power behind what she heard around her. She also explored language, expressing herself through creative writing, and was first published in a statewide collection of student writing at eight years old. She began melding her musical and literary interests in a high school project in which she composed percussion music inspired by the works of James Baldwin and performed the composition for a school assembly.   Sheryl also presented a chemistry research project that systematically tested materials for drumheads to the International Science and Engineering Fair. She gave the commencement address at her NC School of Science and Mathematics high school graduation after a draft of the speech won her the honor.
     In the four summers during her undergraduate career, Sheryl explored the outdoors, taught inner city Boston youth drumming and chemistry, interned in the Letters Department of Newsweek, and studied jembe drumming in West Africa, all funded by her Morehead Scholarship.
     During her time at UNC, she also ran an elementary school creative writing competition for an honor society, composed and premiered pieces with the UNC Percussion Ensemble, and served as section leader for the marching band’s drumline. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BS in Chemistry and Highest Honors for a thesis in her Creative Writing minor.
     Sheryl earned her doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 2003. Her studies include work in simulating ultrafast solution dynamics of inorganic compounds uses molecular dynamics as well as a project in chemistry education that chronicles and analyzes the impact of heterogeneous classes on the achievement of African American chemistry students in an inner city school. Sheryl has also presented a poster of her original research in physical and inorganic chemistry at an American Chemical Society National Meeting and attended a conference on environmentally responsible chemistry. Currently, she is working part-time on several research projects in education and is exploring various opportunities, including publishing more accessible versions of her education research.
     Throughout her course of study at Berkeley she has continued to pursue writing with a passion. She completed the first Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship and completed a Poetry for the People course with June Jordan. Sheryl is also a jazz musician and composer. She continues to perform and write music with the trio the Tangria Jazz Group, which she joined a few years ago. The trio's first CD, comprised entirely of songs for Lady Bird and including two originals by Sheryl, was released in July of 2003.

Lady Bird the Music

Sheryl Mebane performing on the drums

Sheryl is a jazz musician and composer. She continues to perform and write music with the trio the Tangria Jazz Group which she joined a few years ago. The trio's first CD, comprised entirely of songs for Lady Bird, is available now. Click here to order Lady Bird, the CD.