About Sheila

Sheila Webster Boneham, Ph.D., MFA, has written nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for academic, literary, and commercial markets. Her work has earned her a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship, the Prime Number Magazine Award for Creative Nonfiction and six Maxwell and MUSE awards for fiction and nonfiction from the professional organizations for dog and cat writers. Her essays and poems have appeared in the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, Red Earth Review, The Written River Journal of Eco-poetics, The Wayfarer, Minerva Rising, and elsewhere. The four novels in her Animals in Focus mystery series have earned much praise for accurate portrayals of nonhuman characters. She has also written 17 nonfiction books about dogs, cats, and animal rescue. Learn more at sheilaboneham.com.

Sheila has taught writing (not to mention hunt seat equitation and dog obedience classes!) for more decades than she cares to divulge. She holds a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University and MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her dogs have more letters around their names than she has. To learn about Sheila's current and upcoming classes, click here. 

Animals have always been part of Sheila’s life. In her teens and twenties she showed horses, then “downsized” to showing her Australian Shepherds and Labrador Retrievers in various canine sports. She has also bred top-winning Aussies, founded rescue groups for Aussies and Labs, and owned dogs of all kinds, big and small, purebred and mixed, and volunteered with her certified therapy dogs. Cats, too, have been beloved friends throughout Sheila’s life, and there may have been a hamster and bird or two in the mix as well.