Sheila Black

Black at the 2017 Texas Book Festival.

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,

“As a poet, a storyteller, I am attracted to the unruly and confrontational elements of the confessional, to the ways it complicates personal truth through a presentation that makes the audience continually question whether the speaker is to be trusted”

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

External links

• "Four Questions with Editor Sheila Black, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability". Duke City Fix. September 18, 2011.
• http://krwg.org/post/interview-poet-sheila-black
• http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/poetry/black_s/land.htm