# Sheila Black

Sheila Black, an American poet, has written over 40 books for children and young adults as well as four poetry collections. She was a 2000: U.S. co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, and a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship.

## Life

She graduated from Barnard College and received her master's degree from the University of Montana. . Teaching part-time at New Mexico State University and also working as Development Director for the Colonias Development Council, Sheila Black continues to write poetry, recently becoming co-editor of Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen. Sheila Black was diagnosed with XLH, commonly referred to as Vitamin-D Resistant Rickets, at a young age. Black continues to advocate for equal rights for persons with disabilities. She has three children and lives with her husband in Texas.

## Style
### Confessional poetry

In her poems, Sheila Black writes in a confessional style, often referencing past conflicts that resulted from her diagnosis of XLH, such as in her poem What You Mourn. According to Sheila Black,

## Reviews

* On Love/Iraq:
   Sheila Black's poems are heavy and yet porous, racing toward transcendence and then slowing down to whisper a telling detail
   Perhaps the broad message of Love/Iraq can be understood simply by taking its title at face value. There is a borderline—a slash—between two wholly different states (one a political state, the other a state of being). The concept can be viewed as a face in stark relief, with one half shadowed black and the other white: the yin and the yang. It’s this balance that characterizes the experience of reading Love/Iraq, as the collection offers a narrative circularity, along with the seamless interweaving of the ethereal and the concrete. Sheila Black’s poems are heavy yet porous, racing toward transcendence then slowing down to convey a telling detail.
* On House of Bone:
   In How to Be a Maquiladora, Sheila Black demonstrated her gift for using details to create images that evoke the life and environment of a specific locale. In House of Bone, her first major collection of poetry, Black paints with a much broader stroke. Not only does House of Bone, cover a much wider range of topics and experiences, but the particularities that she describe also seem to begrudgingly conceal the universal in the particular. This collection is also a much more personal book. While individual poems in Maquiladora, such as "Desert Life," remind the reader that the poet was no mere observer but a part of that environment about which she wrote, in House of Bone, Black's own experiences provide the grist for the poems.

## Selected works
### Poetry collections

* House of Bone. CW Press. Poems.; Wordtech Communications, 2007, ISBN 9781933456621
* Love/Iraq. CW Press. Poems.; WordTech Communications, 2009, ISBN 9781934999752
* Wen Kroy,, Dream Horse Press, 2014, ISBN 9781935716266
* Iron/Ardent, Educe Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0996571647
* Radium Dream, Salmon Poetry, 2022, ISBN 9781915022110

### Poetry collections, collaborative

* Continental Drift, with Michelle Marcoux. Patriothall, Edinburgh, UK. Poems, Paintings.

### Poetry collections, co-editor

* Sheila Black; Jennifer Bartlett; Michael Northen, eds. (2011). Beauty Is A Verb. Cinco Puntos Press. ISBN 978-1-935955-37-5.. Poems.

### Children's books

* My Very Own Tooth Fairy Pillow, Random House Children's Books, 1990, ISBN 9780307140043
* Patrick the Pup, Andrews and McMeel/Ariel Books, 1996, ISBN 9780836221138
* Will the Real Ms. X Please Report to the Principal!, Troll, 1998, ISBN 9780816748136
* Me and Maya, the super brain, McGraw-Hill School Division, 2000, ISBN 9780021852338
* Lassie (1994), Puffin High Flyer, Troll, ISBN 0140368027