Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections that’s what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021) and one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press/A Gathering of the Tribes, 2011). She was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Coney Island, New York, across the street from the Atlantic Ocean. Her family hails from Honduras.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Bomb, Gulf Coast, Hostos Review, Ping Pong, Rattapallax, and Callaloo, and online at Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), House Party (The Poetry Project), Luna Luna, Hyperallergic, and Aster(ix) Journal. They have been anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, Word: An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes, and Me No Habla with Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry. Her poetry lesson plans have appeared in Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry, Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature and Teacher & Writers Magazine.

She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has received three Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grants and was granted residencies at the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York and at Fundación Valparaíso in Andalucía, Spain. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and as a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. During the pandemic, she was part of Un/Mute, an online residency created by Undercurrent Gallery in New York and the European Union National Institutes for Culture that paired her with a European artist and resulted in a gallery exhibition of a visual and text-based installation.

She served as an associate poetry editor for Tribes magazine online and has read and curated readings at the Met and Whitney Museums. She was featured at the Unamuno Author Series Festival in Madrid, Spain and the Festival Americano de Poesía en Hurlingham, Argentina. Her original and curated photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine and in kiosks around New York for the Instagram site Nuevayorkinos as part of Hispanic Heritage Month.

She teaches English for The City University of New York and as a teaching artist has led residencies for Teachers & Writers Collaborative and National Book Foundation. She holds degrees in English from Brown University and creative writing/poetry from The City College of New York. She lives in a one-bedroom in uptown Manhattan where she is working on an ongoing project about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.