Our next guest is prize winning writer and visual Artist, Sheila Squillante! Sheila’s writing includes the essay collection, All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food. She is the author of the poetry collections, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize and Beautiful Nerve as well as four chapbooks of poetry: Dear Sunder (dancing girl, 2023), In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens, 2014), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line, 2012) and A Woman Traces the Shoreline (dancing girl, 2011). The Brightest Days: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Braddock Avenue Books in 2025. Sheila is co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page (Sense Publishers, 2015) and is currently at work on a memoir about her coming of age as a feminist as well as a documentary prose project about her mother’s life. In addition to her work as a writer, Squillante is a visual artist. Her abstract paintings have been featured in Brevity and A-Minor Magazine and as cover art for Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She is a member of the Confluence Women’s Art Collective in Pittsburgh, where she lives with a messy but sincere garden, two dogs, a bird, two teenagers, and a philosopher.