literary work
Tyler Robert Sheldon is an American poet, writer, educator, and editor. 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 Everything is Ghosts (Finishing Line, 2024) 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!
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academic work
Sheldon currently holds a Teaching Fellowship in the Department of English at Louisiana State University, where earned his PhD in English in 2024 and has received several awards for his writing and pedagogy. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University, where he taught English Composition, as well as an MA and a BA in English from Emporia State University, where he won awards for his academic and literary work. He earned his AS in Psychology from Hutchinson Community College. ​
Sheldon has taught English at the college level in both Kansas and Louisiana, and he is a certified Master Level English & Writing Tutor through the College Reading and Learning Association. His research interests include poetry and poetics, rhetoric and composition, literary theory, memoir, comics studies, and Holocaust studies.
life in general
Sheldon lives in Louisiana with his spouse, muse, and creative partner, the talented visual artist and upholsterer Alexandria Arceneaux. He enjoys cooking, documentaries, good coffee, music of pretty much any genre, playing guitar, kayaking, pottery, printmaking, walking sandbars, and attending art openings and poetry readings.
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He also loves animals of all sorts. His adorable cats, Chai and Scruffy, keep him busy with their impish antics, but he relishes being a cat parent, and would absolutely adopt all the cats if it were remotely possible.
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Photos © Festival of Words LA (poetry reading), and Tyler Robert Sheldon (self-portrait, Traumas copies,
PhD tam and Fender Stratocaster, Martin LXM, Underwood typewriter). Traumas cover art © J. Bruce Fuller.