Sheila Smith McKoy (BA – North Carolina State University;  MA –  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;  PhD –  Duke University) is an award-winning poet, fiction writer, filmmaker and mediator. She was awarded the 2020 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Prize in poetry and the 2025 Teaching Literature Book Award for her co-edited Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons (2023). She is author the poetry collections Above the Rushes (2026) and The Bones Beneath (2024) and co-author of co-author of One Window’s Light: A Haiku Collection and Griots: Keepers of the Story (2026). Smith McKoy is author, editor or co-editor of numerous scholarly books, including most recently co-editing The Wisdom of Ifá: An Ancient Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond (2025). She also wrote, produced, directed and/ or served as executive producer for four documentary films. Smith McKoy served as editor of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora (2006 – 2015) and currently serves on the editorial board of Juxtaposition: The Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship. Smith McKoy returned to live in her hometown, Raleigh, NC, in 2024.