Writing under the pen name Shatara Liora, she is a writer of poetry, prose, and fiction; a clinical therapist; a visual artist; a healthcare leader; and founder of Poetic Living + Merch, a collection of literary-inspired art, gifts, and home goods celebrating healing and intentional living. Blending personal insight with clinical understanding, her work explores healing, resilience, identity, and the complexities of the human experience.
She earned her Master of Social Work from Winthrop University and her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Although her professional foundation is rooted in mental health, writing has remained one of her greatest teachers. What began as a deeply personal journey through grief and restoration became a lifelong commitment to storytelling.
Shatara is the author of the indie poetry collections East of A Cold Red Sun and Love’s Third Eye, both of which debuted in multiple #1 poetry categories on Amazon upon their release. Her work has appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review, Rigorous Literary Magazine, Tangled Locks Journal, Black Girl In Om, and Sunflowers at Midnight. She was a semifinalist in the American Literary Review poetry contest, has been featured in Nailed Magazine, and served as Poetry Editor for Qu Literary Magazine.
Today, alongside her creative work, she serves in healthcare leadership, leading initiatives that support children and families while continuing to create art that encourages reflection, healing, and hope.
Morri Creech, Professor of Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte, wrote the following in response to Shatara’s MFA thesis:
This is easily one of the best thesis I’ve read in many years, maybe in my whole time at Queens. It’s marvelous. Just marvelous. There’s tenderness here, and pathos, and clear-eyed examinations of painful subjects with delicacy, tact, and aplomb. The best of the poems here display a powerful use of surreal imagery—or “deep” image—and the use of this imagery is both grounding and hallucinatory, rich in figurative and connotative power. In the best of these poems, the imagery serves to forward the narrative, create sensory impressions of actions and feelings, expanding the reader’s understanding of the realities the poems so successfully plumb and examine.
A lifelong traveler, Shatara was born in Hawaii and has lived in Greece, Iceland, and Spain. She finds inspiration in art galleries, museums, nature, the mountains, soft surrealism, and all things vintage.
For business inquiries: business@shataraliora.com
