Sheldon Channer is a budding poet. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, his writing has been influenced by his experiences and observations of poverty and violence common to residents of Kingston. Writing was the vent through which he released his anger, frustrations, hopes, and dreams.

He has been studying and writing poetry for the past 15 years. Although Channer has read many poems from many different poets, his primary influence has been the poems of T.S. Eliot, Mutabaruka, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes. However, he has also studied the poems of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Oliver, and Paul Genega, and the writings on poetry by William Baer and Harold Bloom.

Channer spent two years at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, before migrating to the United States in 1998 and entering Montclair State University. He holds an MA in Law and Governance with concentrations in Legal Information and Intellectual Property Management and a BA in Sociology with a concentration in Social Research.

Since 2006, Channer’s essays, articles, and social commentary have periodically been published in the Jamaica Gleaner. He is currently editing the manuscript for his first book of poems to be titled Time and Other Enemies and is working on his first novel, Moral Obligations.

- Read Channer's work in progress @ http://www.poertyexpose.blogspot.com/