Sheila Squillante is a writer and visual artist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her debut essay collection, All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food, was published by CLASH Books in November, 2023. She is the author of the poetry collections, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from Brick House Books, and Beautiful Nerve (Tiny Hardcore Books, 2015), as well as four chapbooks of poetry: Dear Sunder (dancing girl, 2023), In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens, 2014), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line, 2012) and A Woman Traces the Shoreline (dancing girl, 2011). She is co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page (Sense Publishers, 2015) and is currently at work on a memoir about her coming of age as a feminist as well as a documentary prose project about her mother’s life.

Squillante began her life in Yonkers, NY and her life as a writer at Manhattanville College, where she received her BA in creative writing in 1993. She went on to earn an MA in creative writing from Southern Connecticut State University and an MFA in poetry from Penn State University where she studied memoir writing with Vivian Gornick. Her essay, “Shift,” written in Gornick’s class, went on to win the inaugural Story of Your Life contest for Glamour Magazine, judged by Nora Ephron in 2003. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals including Brevity, River Teeth, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review and Copper Nickel, and has been translated into Italian. Her work on literature and creative writing as public scholarship and her food writing have been published by Oxford University Press. She has been the recipient of fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sundress Academy and Wild Acres. 

She was the assistant director of the MFA program at Penn State where she also taught writing for twelve years. In 2013 she joined the MFA faculty at Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she now serves as program director and associate professor. For more than a decade she was the facilitator of the Summer Community of Writers, a ten-day residency that brought together nationally renowned writers, MFA students and community members for intensive study at Eden Hall, Chatham’s beautiful organic farm campus. She is executive editor of The Fourth River, Chatham’s journal of nature and place-based writing. In June, 2025, she founded the Fallingwater Residency in Nature and Place-Based Writing, a collaboration between Chatham MFA and the Western PA Conservancy.

Other editorial work includes PANK, where she was reviews editor and blog editor, and Barrelhouse Magazine, where she served as online editor responsible for blog columns and special issues, including two e-book tributes to the work of Prince and David Bowie. She currently serves as an editor-at-large. 

In addition to her work as a writer, Squillante is a visual artist. Her abstract paintings have been featured in Brevity and A-Minor Magazine and as cover art for Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.  She is a member of the Confluence Women’s Art Collective in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her family.