Age: 64
Hometown: Staten Island
Current residence: Pittsford
Occupation: President and founder of The ShermanEDGE; author
Before Pam Sherman wrote two books, she was traveling the world building a coaching business based on her experiences. Before that, she landed a syndicated newspaper column by making an editor’s wife laugh in a dressing room. Before that, she was an award-winning stage actor in DC for 17 years. And before any of the curtain calls, she was a lawyer.
Sherman was born in Staten Island to an OB/GYN father who delivered 5,000 babies and a Freudian psychoanalyst mother.
“That’s probably why I’m funny,” she said. “If I had a headache at dinner, my father said, ‘take two aspirin,’ and my mother said, ‘who are you mad at?’”
She met Neal Sherman — whom she always refers to by his full name, in third person — during a semester abroad in London and then married him 42 years ago. From there, the entrepreneurial couple began a journey that took them from the Washington, DC area to Rochester. Geneva, to be exact, where Neal grew up. Home came knocking in the form of redeveloping the Seneca Army Depot, 10,587 acres once used as munitions storage and a disposal facility by the U.S. Army.
With their 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter in tow, the Shermans uprooted a 17-year life in D.C. and moved to “a cornfield in the middle of nowhere.”
That cornfield was actually Pittsford, and Sherman soon found herself meeting the locals. One of them was Meg Mundy, the cofounder of Rochester Fashion Week, and during a shopping event Mundy hosted, Sherman befriended a woman named Lara Liu in the dressing room.
Liu pitched Sherman on meeting her husband, Mark, then editor of the “Democrat and Chronicle”’s glossy monthly publication, “Rochester Magazine.” Sherman’s many past lives at that point didn’t include ‘writer’ in the traditional sense. But why let that stop her?
“I told Mark I’d like to write about the surprise that happened to me when I moved to a cornfield, and I cried for a long time, but I kept meeting people who were irreverent and funny and laughed about the weather,” she said. “I’d love to write about how, even if you move to a cornfield, your horizons can be widened beyond what you can imagine.”
She got the gig. Her “Suburban Outlaw” column was eventually syndicated, running in 53 Gannett newspapers across the United States.
“I pulled into Cincinnati once, and there was my column,” said Sherman. “Super cool, and It all started in ‘Rochester Magazine.’”
Sherman’s first book, “The Suburban Outlaw: Tales from the Edge” was a compilation of best-loved Gannett columns, published in 2009, about five years into the column. Her second book, “Play You, the Role of a Lifetime: Bridge the Believability Gap to Boost Your Confidence, Connection, and Impact” was published in April 2026, culminating eight years of work.
Those years were punctuated with stints on the road, playing newspaper columnist and humorist Erma Bombeck in the hit one-woman play “Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End” in cities around the US for seven years.
The acting was relevant to the book; it’s the core of what she teaches with her business The ShermanEDGE, which offers consulting and workshops around, chiefly, embracing your everyday life by playing the leading role. It was an idea born from both necessity (she and Neal had two children to send to college) and guidance from a lawyer friend.
“Mitch Nusbaum at Woods Oviatt who said to me, ‘No, no. You don’t want to be a lawyer again,’” she said. “Then he said, ‘But could you help my lawyers do what you do? The way you talk to people and find out their stories and engage them?’”
Another early supporter of The ShermanEDGE was Sharon Napier, founder and CEO of creative ad agency Partners + Napier. The two met through a mutual friend, and Napier first recommended Sherman as a consultant for clients at Kodak. Sherman then contributed to The Napier Experience, a fall program at Rochester Institute of Technology that selects 20 School of Individualized Study students to learn from industry leaders, build their personal brand and find inspiration as they design an individualized degree.
“Anytime you work with Pam, she’s just so inspiring, she has this sort of magnetism,” said Napier. “She makes you write your own story. She makes you really think about who you are.”
There’s all the work, of course, and then there’s Sherman the friend, mother, wife, nonprofit board president and fundraiser auctioneer — a person many in Rochester now know and love as her tenure here begins to outnumber the years spent in D.C.
“She’s a natural connector,” said Napier. “She is interested in you when she’s talking to you, and she always follows through with what she says she’s going to do. Huge, you know? But I can also call her and say, ‘I really need to get a glass of wine,’ and we can talk shorthand.”
It’s an understatement to call Sherman’s resume ‘long,’ and presumptive to think she is anywhere near finished adding to the list — as long as there’s impact in what she does.
“The first thing you learn as an actor is that it’s not about you. It’s about the other person. It’s about the audience, it’s about the journey,” she said. “And so the throughline for me is: it’s not about me.” thepamsherman.com —LEAH STACY
