When Sheila McEntee was 11 years old, her family moved from Cheverly, Maryland, to Hingham, Massachusetts, a quaint New England town where summers were mild but winters were cold and dark. Likely spurred by those bitter-cold winters, her father began feeding and watching birds. He learned, and taught her, the names of their avian neighbors. He built her a small, wooden platform, which he placed outside her bedroom window, where she could sprinkle seeds and get an up-close view of the birds. For a lonely preteen, Sheila says, birdwatching became not only a fascination but also a comfort, as it is, still, today.

Sheila later majored in English at the College of the Holy Cross and went on to wear many professional hats, among them child care worker, writer and editor, wildlife advocate and lobbyist, and even drum circle facilitator. Writing for Wonderful West Virginia magazine and then serving as its editor from 2006 to 2014 was a joyful chapter in her career.

Today Sheila lives and works in Charleston, West Virginia. Her personal essays, many related to nature, have appeared in anthologies and other publications, among them The Brevity Blog, Stonecrop Review, Still: The Journal, Woods Reader, Wonderful West Virginia, and the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Several of these essays appear together for the first time in her first book, Soul Friend and Other Love Notes to the Natural World, to be released in Spring 2025 by Blackwater Press.