SHEILA SQUILLANTE is the author of the poetry collections, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books, and Beautiful Nerve, as well as three chapbooks of poetry: In This Dream of My Father, Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry and A Woman Traces the Shoreline. Her fourth chapbook, Dear Sunder, will be published by dancing girl press in 2022, and her debut essay collection by CLASH Books in 2023. She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page.
She directs and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University, where she is Executive Editor of The Fourth River, a journal of nature and place-based writing.
During the pandemic, she became obsessed with three things: plants, perfume and painting. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with two dogs, a lizard, a bird, two teenagers and a philosopher.