It's always good to present a writer from Tucson
and one from the creative writing faculty here.
Last year, when Aurelie Sheehan applied among a strong field
for the position, she was interviewed intensely
and showed a literary background and teaching
skills that were, by any standards, impressive.
And then at the end of a very long day,
she read from her new work, from the novel
called "The Blind Girl."
And when she was done, it was clear,
at least to me, that what we needed to do
was to convince her to come here and be
part of the literary community in Tucson.
We did, and luckily for us now, she is.
It's a delight to read Aurelie's work.
Her prose is a wake-up call, graceful and strong,
without ever being overwrought, and often, by the way, funny.
Her characters are surprising, sharply drawn, usually hugely
and comically different from one another,
and run-ins between these diverse characters
are a Sheehan specialty, the engines
for many of the stories.
Aurelie was raised in Connecticut,
attended Hampshire College and the City College of New York.
Among other honors, she's won a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship
at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis,
France, also, the Jack Kerouac Literary Prize
for the title story in her book of short fiction
called Jack Kerouac is Pregnant.
Kerouac, she writes in that story,
would hear the wind of possibility
in his head like a cyclone and be blown over
by the immensity of the present tense.
The Kerouac folks must have liked that.
As an arts administrator, she's run the residency program
at the Ucross Foundation in the wilds of Wyoming
and just recently, has been the poetry coordinator
at the Folger Shakespeare Library
in the wilds of Washington DC.
At the Poetry Center, we're lucky to have enlisted her
on our literary advisory committee, which helps us
plan our future reading series.
All in all, we're quite glad that Aurelie Sheehan is here
in Tucson, and I'm sure, after you meet her and hear her work,
that you will be, too.
Will you welcome please, Aurelie Sheehan.
[APPLAUSE]