I spent thirty years helping people survive the hardest chapters of their lives. Then I had a few of my own. That's when I finally became a writer. — Sheri Boelter
Writer · Speaker · Clinical Social Worker
Sheri Boelter
There is a story inside every person I've ever met.
I've spent more than thirty years sitting across from people in the hardest moments of their lives — teenagers sleeping in caves and on the rooftops of apartment buildings, veterans tormented by trauma who couldn't find their way home, families watching mental illness quietly steal someone they love, and people held together by nothing but will and exhaustion.
What I learned in those rooms wasn't just about them. It was about all of us. About how much we carry quietly. About how rarely we tell the truth about it. About how badly the world needs people willing to say the thing out loud.
I am a writer. That is the truest thing I can tell you about myself.
I write because I believe words are one of the most powerful forces on earth — and because I've seen what happens when the right ones finally land. I've watched a single sentence change the direction of a person's life. I've felt it happen to me.
Books
Not What They Said I Was
Memoir
My memoir is the book I had to write before I could write anything else. It's the story of a girl from Billings, Montana who was told — early and often — that she wasn't quite right. A girl with dyslexia who couldn't read aloud without shame crawling up her throat, who built a thirty-year career leading organizations that served the most vulnerable people in her community, who fell hard and publicly and had to find out who she was when everything she'd built was stripped away.
It is a book about betrayal. About identity. About what it means to survive the story someone else wrote about you — and finally write your own.
The Ward
Debut Novel · Psychological Thriller
My debut novel is a psychological thriller set in a Montana psychiatric facility in 1993. A state grant auditor has been wrongfully committed. For twenty-two years, no one read his file closely enough to notice. Then a new Clinical Director does — and everything begins to unravel.
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest told from Nurse Ratched's point of view. Except she's trying to be the hero. And the system won't let her."
I spent decades inside systems like the one in that book. I know exactly how they work. I know exactly how they fail. I wrote The Ward because fiction can sometimes tell the truth that nonfiction is afraid to say directly.
Essays & Articles
Beyond books, I write articles and essays — about leadership, about the helping professions, about empty nests and new chapters and the strange, necessary grief of becoming someone different than you thought you'd be.
I write about the things people are afraid to say out loud. I write for the woman who is holding it together on the outside and quietly falling apart on the inside. I write for the leader who gives everything to everyone else and has forgotten what it feels like to want something for herself.
I write for you, if any of that sounds familiar.
Read the essays →The Other Work
I am also a clinical social worker with thirty years of experience in behavioral health, veteran services, mental health and substance use treatment, and nonprofit leadership. I consult with organizations and speak to audiences about trauma-informed leadership, vicarious trauma, and what it looks like to rebuild after catastrophic loss. That work matters deeply to me.
But it is not the first thing I want you to know about me.
The first thing I want you to know is this: I believe your story matters. I believe the truth — even the hard, ugly, inconvenient truth — is worth telling. And I believe that when we finally say the real thing, something in the room shifts.
That's what I'm here for.
Background
Recognition
Top 10 Inspiring Leaders — Industry Era (2024) Inspiring Woman of the Year — Glamour Magazine (2014) Employer of Choice — Job Service Montana (2023)