Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Sheila Maldonado

Sheila has worked with Teachers & Writers Collaborative since 2003. She has taught poetry and stories in virtually every grade level in NYC public schools, as well as in shelters and in special needs, bilingual, and Spanish-only classrooms. She’s also taught high school essay writing and college-level English composition at CUNY. Sheila began teaching writing through the Poetry Outreach Center at the City College of New York, home of one of the city’s longest-running poetry festivals, where she received an MA in creative writing.

Sheila is a lifelong writer and native New Yorker. She grew up in Coney Island between Surf and Mermaid Avenues, across the street from the Atlantic Ocean. Her family is still there when they’re not at their house in Honduras. She won poetry writing and recital contests in English and Spanish as a public school student in Brooklyn, and wrote for a citywide teen magazine, New Youth Connections, in high school. She received a BA in English from Brown University.

As an adult, Sheila’s poems have been published in academic and downtown journals, including Callaloo, Meridians, Rattapallax, Live Mag!, and Stretching Panties, as well as online at the Acentos Review. She has also written articles and reviews for magazines and newspapers such as the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, Paper, Latina, and Urban Latino. She worked as an editor for Latina and Blaze magazines, and as a researcher for Vanity Fair and O at Home, an Oprah Magazine.

Sheila still possesses diaries from her pre-teen years, in which she wrote soap opera storylines, apocalyptic poems, and analyses of herself and her family. She often begins residencies by giving students a quick glimpse of the journal in which she currently writes. She keeps it in her bag, the way they do their music players or phones. She wants them to think of writing as portable and every day, as essential to their expression as their toys.

She lives uptown now and writes most on the train.