Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections that's what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021) and one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Bomb, Gulf Coast, Ping Pong, and Callaloo, and anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. She teaches English for The City University of New York and has led residencies as a teaching artist for the National Book Foundation and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She has degrees in English from Brown University and creative writing / poetry from The City College of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan where she is working on an ongoing book project about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.