Biography
Aurelie Sheehan was born in Verdun, France, and grew up in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Hampshire College in 1984 and an M.A. from The City College of CUNY in New York in 1990.
Since 2000, she has been on the faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Previous teaching positions were held in the Part-time Graduate Program at Johns Hopkins University, Sheridan College, and The City College. She also ran the Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC for three years, coordinated the residency program at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and worked as an assistant editor at Child Magazine.
Her collection of short stories, Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant, was published in 1994, with a paperback reissue in 2001, both with Dalkey Archive Press. She is the author of two novels, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, published by Penguin in 2004, and History Lesson for Girls, published by Viking in 2006, with a Penguin paperback released in 2007. A novella, This Blue, came out as a Ploughshares Solo in 2013. Her collection of shorts, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories, came out in 2013 (BOA Editions, Ltd.), followed in 2014 by a collection of linked stories set in Tucson, Demigods on Speedway (University of Arizona Press).
Individual stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many venues, including Alaska Review, The American Voice, Confrontation, Conjunctions, Copper Nickel, Critical Quarterly, Epoch, Fairy Tale Review, Fence, Fiction International, The Florida Review, Gargoyle, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hotel Amerika, Kalliope, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, The New York Times, Nimrod, Paris Transcontinental, Ploughshares, Quick Fiction, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Spork, and Willow Springs, as well as The Pushcart Prize XXIII: Best of the Small Presses, Best of the West 2009, Best of the West 2010, and xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths. Book reviews and criticism have been published in CONTEXT: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Belles Lettres, and Essay Daily.
She has received an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artist Project Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Foundation Fellowship, and the Jack Kerouac Literary Award. She’s been a writer in residence at the Sanskriti Kendra in New Delhi, India; the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland; and the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming.
Sheehan lives in Tucson with her husband and daughter.