Here I am now as Stacey Richter, no longer as myself.
And I'd like to second Stacey Richter
in saying that it's a phenomenal pleasure
to be introducing Aurelie Sheehan tonight.
She is, in addition to being the director of the University
of Arizona creative writing program, the author of three
books--
Jack Kerouac is Pregnant, a collection of short stories.
The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, a novel.
And History Lessons for Girls, a novel published by Viking
this past July.
Aurelie has received a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Fellowship,
the Jack Kerouac literary award, and an Artist Project award
from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
Her prose and poetry have appeared in many magazines,
including Haydens Ferry Review and Shenandoah.
Aurelie Sheehan's work is that rare thing:
a marriage of page turning storytelling,
with richly textured inventive prose.
It's tempting to linger on each of Aurelie's sentences,
on the surprising images in her sentences.
For instance, the number zero displayed on an answering
machine like she writes a-- it--
[AUDIO OUT] But then it would be impossible to gallop
through her stories as a whole swift tale of characters
seeking balance and meaning, sometimes through unbalanced
means.
Sheehan's characters are idiosyncratic searchers.
Moral beings in a chaotic land.
And through them, Sheehan conveys a generous view
of the world.
One in which girls and women struggle
to understand their lives and their own crooked paths.
Alison Glass, the heroine of History Lesson for Girls,
explains "There was no reason I couldn't live this way,
with a curved back in peace.
Like any imperfect but plausible thing,
a tree growing around a telephone wire."
Please welcome Aurelie Sheehan.
[APPLAUSE]