Sheila Black was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She earned a BA in French literature from Barnard College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. Her fifth full-length book is Vivisection (forthcoming 2022). She is the author of a chapbook All the Sleep in the World (2021), Iron, Ardent (2017), Wen Kroy (2014), Love/Iraq (2009), and House of Bone (2007). She has co-edited two anthologies: Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011) and The Right Way to Be Crippled & Naked: The Fiction of Disability (2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry magazine, the Spectacle, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She has also written more than 40 books for children and young adults. She was a 2000 U.S. co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize and a 2012 winner of the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Black is a cofounder of Zoeglossia, a nonprofit organization that strives to build community for poets with disabilities and promotes their work. She is the current director of development for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). Before that, she served as associate director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at New Mexico State University Foundation. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.