Aurelie Sheehan

Aurelie Sheehan is the author of three short story collections, Demigods on Speedway (University of Arizona Press 2014), Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA Editions, Ltd. 2013), and Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant (Dalkey Archive Press 1994), as well as two novels, History Lesson for Girls (Viking Penguin 2006) and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Penguin 2004). Jewelry Box was named an “outstanding 2013 short story collection” by The Story Prize. Her most recent collection, Once into the Night, is the recipient of FC2’s 2018 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and will be published in 2019. A novella, This Blue, came out as a Ploughshares Solo in 2014. Individual stories and essays have also appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, Epoch, Fence, Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal, New England Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, and in the anthologies xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths, Best of the West 2009, and Best of the West 2010. Sheehan has received a Pushcart Prize, a Jack Kerouac Literary Award, the Camargo Fellowship, and an Artists Projects Award from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and she’s been a resident at the Ucross Foundation, Sanskriti Kendra, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. She’s taught workshops at many schools including Hampshire College, NAU, and ASU. She currently serves on the Fulbright U.S. Student National Screening Committee, and is a 2018-2019 fellow in UA’s Academic Leadership Institute.  

Sheehan received her B.A. from Hampshire College and an M.A. from The City College of the City University of New York. Her teaching and research interests include the novel and short story, flash fiction and prose poetry, the novella, and cross-genre writing. In addition to workshops, she’s taught graduate craft seminars on topics including: Plot and Its Discontents, The Art of the Short Novel, Parameters of Fiction, and Brevity, Economy, and Lush Life.