Sheri Winston (CNM, RN, BSN, LMT) is one of the country’s leading teachers about sex and sexuality. She is the founder and executive director of the Kingston, NY-based Center for the Intimate Arts. As a teacher, Winston is hailed for her lively and engaging style, the comfort level she creates for her students, and the high quality and original content of her material. Her first book, Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure, won the 2010 Book of the Year Award from the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. Winston’s journey to being a sex teacher began when she became a licensed massage therapist in 1980. This was the first of many times she was to study the human anatomy. Soon after, she felt called to become a midwife and began assisting and apprenticing at home births. She then became a childbirth educator and doula (someone who provides professional labor support). In order to become legally certified, she attended nursing school at SUNY/Stony Brook and graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude, receiving her BSN (Bachelor's degree in Science of Nursing) and becoming a RN (registered nurse). She then attended midwifery school for her graduate education, becoming a certified nurse-midwife and gynecology nurse-practitioner. Spending twenty years serving the power of birth turned out to be the best possible apprenticeship Winston could have for being a sex teacher. This is because it was the birth process that taught her much of what she learned about how to have great sex. For years, she taught women how to breathe themselves into an altered state; how to surrender to the tide of labor; how to release their sound and use it to open themselves; and how to use their pelvic muscles as well as their mind to facilitate the birth process. She helped women get in touch with their innate wisdom and showed them how to use their inner tools to cooperate with the natural process. During this time, Winston had also unwittingly incorporated these skills and practices into her own increasingly fabulous sex life. Once she became aware that she’d been unconsciously using these techniques, she decided to start learning and practicing them purposefully—and she made it her personal mission to bring her specialized knowledge about how to have great sex to men and women everywhere.