writer, editor, critic

Tyler Robert Sheldon is an American poet, writer, educator, editor, and critic. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections When to Ask for Rain (Spartan, 2021), and Driving Together (Meadowlark Books, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Consolation Prize (Finishing Line, 2018), Traumas (Yellow Flag Press, 2017), and First Breaths of Arrival (Oil Hill Press, 2016). With James Benger he coauthored Against the Dark: road poems (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), a composite travel narrative. Sheldon is the Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review, and is also a book reviewer for various print and online publications. His poetry, fiction, artwork, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, The Tulane Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Pleiades, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Coal City Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Entropy Magazine, Thorny Locust, The Big Nasty Press, and other places.

Sheldon has received the Charles E. Walton Essay Award, the Dickens Project Essay Prize, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Award. Find him on Chill Subs, the Poets & Writers Directory and The Map of Kansas Literature. The American Press and The Emporia Gazette have profiled his writing, and his work is also archived in the Kansas Studies Collection at Washburn University.

Read some of his writing here, and see his work as an editor and reader at MockingHeart Review, Veterans Voices Magazine, and Heartland!

academic

Sheldon holds an A.S. in Psychology from Hutchinson Community College as well as a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Emporia State University, where he won awards for his academic and literary work. He also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from McNeese State University, where he taught English Composition. Sheldon is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Louisiana State University, where he has received awards for his writing and pedagogy.

educator

Sheldon has taught English at the college level in both Kansas and Louisiana, and is a certified Master Level English & Writing Tutor through the College Reading and Learning Association. His research interests include composition, pedagogy, rhetoric, poetry and poetics, literary theory, linguistics, memoir, comics studies, Beat and dystopian literature, and Holocaust studies.

He lives in Louisiana with his spouse, muse, and creative partner, the visual artist Alexandria Arceneaux. He enjoys playing guitar, wheel-throwing, printmaking, walking sandbars, kayaking, and attending art openings and poetry readings as often as possible.

curriculum vitae