Sheila Dietz confronts experience with the acuteness and steadfastness we associate with poets such as Hopkins and Transtromer. Like them, she understands her investigations of the natural world and the workings of memory can offer a glimpse of divinity at one moment, and a reckoning with dread in the next. Dietz writes wise and self-assured poems, noteworthy for striking metaphors, for bravura skill with the line and with syntax, and for a sure and steady command of autobiographical narrative. These are the poems of a mature and fearless poet, a writer of the very first order. — David Wojahn

Sheila Dietz grew up in the Netherlands, attended a Dutch school and began conceiving of the world in literary terms at an early age. Her family moved every 2-3 years, and she experienced all the chaos and dislocation that life entailed. The world she created by writing became her one true and safe home. She has been a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has received an Individual Artist Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received an MFA from Vermont College. She worked as a librarian at the New Haven Free Public Library for many years before retiring as Head of Reference Services. She is the co-founder of the Salt and Pepper Gospel Singers (from New Haven, Connecticut) which is reflected in her work that is often, though not always, spiritual in nature.

"Sheila Dietz's rich, observant poems about menacing forests, childhood betrayals, and bad dreams are receptacles that seem ready to explode any minute, releasing anger and sorrow but also a ferocious delight in life: in this world with its mothers, fathers, and sisters; its forests inhabited by bears." — Alice Mattison