SHEILA SQUILLANTE is a writer and visual artist living in Pittsburgh. She is the author of the essay collection, All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food (Clash Books); two poetry collections, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from Brick House Books, and Beautiful Nerve, as well as four chapbooks of poetry: Dear Sunder, In This Dream of My Father, Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry and A Woman Traces the Shoreline. She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page. Her third collection of poems, The Brightest Days, is forthcoming with Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2027.

She is currently at work on a hybrid project about her mother’s life. You can follow along on Substack.

Her abstract paintings have been featured in numerous literary journals, including Brevity, Asterales, Zocalo Public Square and A-Minor, and as the cover art for Mid-American Review , Boudin and Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She is a member of the Confluence Women’s Art Collective in Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her art here.

She directs and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University. She is executive editor of The Fourth River, Chatham’s journal of nature and place-based writing, and editor-at-large for Barrelhouse Magazine.