For decades in parallel to her art career, Mary Sherman worked as an art critic. She began her writing career as a freelancer for the Chicago Reader, followed by working as the art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and, later, as a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, ARTnews and other publications. Her over two decades of writing include catalog texts, scholarly essays and more than 400 interviews, art reviews and think pieces for national and international magazines, journals and newspapers. (See maryshermanwriter.com.)

In addition, an early drawing of hers Termite was the inspiration for Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Her early painting A Thin Red Line was used as the cover art for the paperback edition of Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman (Plume, 1983); and Nausicaa was the artwork for Sharon’s Lamb’s The Trouble with Blame (Harvard University Press, 1996).

Currently Mary is at work on her first book When The Stars Align. It is part memoir, part Cold War investigative journalism, prompted by the many unexplained encounters she had with her late father, not the least of which was his once showing up at an airport, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.