Her new book, A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, was published in April 2024 by Pegasus Books.

She is represented by Laurie Abkemeier at DeFiore and Company. She also writes and produces stories for radio as an Audio Academy Fellow at KALW Public Media.

Since earning her PhD from Harvard, Sheryl has written extensively about music in American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the role that music can play in civic life. Her first book, God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, was published in 2013 to positive reviews (including pieces in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor) and won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Book Award for music writing. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Slate, Humanities, and The Avid Listener. She appeared in the BBC audio documentary “Government Song Woman” and has been interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” the Washington Post’s “Can He Do That?” podcast, the ABC News podcast “Start Here,” and the public radio news show “The Texas Standard.”

Sheryl has received the Anne Firor Scott Mid-Career Fellowship from the Southern Association for Women Historians (2022), a Public Scholars Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2018), a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2016), and research grants and awards from the American Musicological Society, Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Music Library Association, and Society for American Music.

In addition to her own writing projects, Sheryl’s freelance communications practice provides writing consulting, content development, developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading services, working with individual authors, nonprofit organizations, and research firms.

Sheryl is a co-founding member of the women’s vocal ensemble Solstice. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband Benjamin Shaykin, two sons, and their beloved dog, Maddie.