Sherri Howell

May 18, 1954   -   March 15, 2022

Her light will live on, but Sherri Gardner Howell, 67, of Knoxville transitioned from this Earth on Tuesday, March 15, 2022, in Kingston, Jamaica.

Born Cheryl Diane Gardner on May 18, 1954, in Mobile, Alabama, Sherri was a world traveler by the age of 2, as her U.S. Air Force captain father was stationed at the airbase in Berlin, Germany. She and her parents, Mack and Frances Gardner, and baby brother Tim returned to the States and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, when she was 5.

Tragedy struck a few months later when her father died in an airplane crash in Central America, and her mother moved Sherri and Tim to her hometown of Lexington, Tennessee, where they were surrounded by a large and close extended family.

Sherri came to Knoxville to major in journalism at the University of Tennessee. Even before graduating in 1976, she was already working for the Knoxville News Sentinel, then an E.W. Scripps property. She spent most of her career with Scripps, as a writer, editor, columnist and publisher.

As assistant managing editor at the News Sentinel, Sherri oversaw community and local content for nine feature sections each week, including entertainment, food, lifestyle, travel, family and arts sections. She left the News Sentinel to become publisher of a new weekly community newspaper in Blount County – Blount Today – in August 2004 and stayed there until the paper was closed in October 2011.

She then started her own shop, SGH Enterprises, specializing in magazine features, personal writings and editing. Her concentration was always feature and magazine writing with a personal touch. As sole proprietor of SGH Enterprises, she assisted small businesses and nonprofits with business management and communication issues and wrote for various magazines and community news websites.

She started writing a family-based column in 1988. For the past five years, her column has appeared weekly on the community news website