Sheila Davies Sumner is a writer, poet, and audio artist. Her published works include individual poems, short stories, plays, and essays for print and broadcast. Her stories are published in Rampike, Alcatraz 3, and in the graphic-story magazine, one of one. Her poems have appeared most recently in MARY, A Journal of New Writing, The Squaw Valley Review, and Between the Lines.
She has written and produced original radio dramas, commissioned by New American Radio, including The Opponent’s Queen: Detail, adapted from an epistolary novel; and What is the Matter in Amy Glennon? which received a Prix Futura special commendation for experimental radio. Additionally, she has recorded soundtracks for telephone dramas, dance performances, films, and music festivals, notably New Music America with the piece “Static”, produced by Charles Amirkhanian, which is a sonic commentary about the multiple aspects of Interference. In 2016, she collaborated with filmmaker, Douglas Sandberg on an audio-visual triptych, entitled “Three Terellas.”
In her work, Davies Sumner explores deep space, both astronomical and psychological, highlighting and developing relationships between the intra-personal and the inter-planetary. Currently, she is composing a sci-fi musical, Quantum Tangle. The first two acts of the Prologue were performed as staged readings, most recently at The Sanctuary in Arcata, and at Central Works Theater in Berkeley. The play itself addresses tensions between dystopic and eutopic states of mind and the way love becomes a basis for fundamental transformation.
Sheila is co-curator, with Casey McAlduff, for the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland, which hosts local and national poets. She has contributed interviews to the Studio One blog wherein poets talk about their work and writing practices, in light of the poetics which guide them. Another example of her poetry can be found on the Holy Names University web site, here, and a link to the script for What is the Matter in Amy Glennon can be found here.
