Sheehan, Julie 1964–

PERSONAL: Born July 25, 1964, in Lemars, IA; daughter of James J. (a banker) and Rosemary (a lawyer; maiden name, McGuirk) Sheehan; married John Thorsen, Jr. (an entrepreneur), September 13, 1997; children: Miles. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Yale University, B.A. (English, magna cum laude), 1986; Columbia University, M.F.A. (poetry), 2001. Politics: "Progressive."

ADDRESSES: Home—185 Water Hole Rd., East Hampton, NY 11937. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Poet. Youth Speaks, visiting artist, 2000; Adelphi University, adjunct instructor, 2000; Dowling College, adjunct instructor, 2001–; Ross Institute, visiting artist, 2002–; Suffolk Community College of the State University of New York, adjunct instructor, 2002–; workshop presenter; gives readings from her works. Shakespeare Project, executive producer, 1994–97; also actress in plays produced in New York and at regional theaters.

AWARDS, HONORS: Poets out Loud Prize, Fordham University Press, 2000, for Thaw; special opportunity grant, New York Foundation for the Arts/East End Arts Council, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Thaw (poetry), Fordham University Press (Bronx, NY), 2001.

Work represented in anthologies, including We Thank You, God, for These: Blessings and Prayers for Family Pets, edited by Anthony F. Chiffolo and Rayner W. Hesse, Jr., illustrated by Andrew Lattimore, Paulist Press (New York, NY), 2003. Contributor to periodicals, including Salmagundi, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Imagination, Yale Review, Briar Cliff Review, Commonweal, Southwest Humanities Review, Ploughshares, and Texas Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Quick Studies (tentative title), a poetry collection.

SIDELIGHTS: Julie Sheehan told CA: "My second book manuscript, tentatively titled Quick Studies, continues the unique aesthetic project I've undertaken in Thaw of reassembling 'old rhetorics,' as Richard Howard has described it. However, the rhetorics I reassemble are not all old: newspaper headlines, bits of overheard conversations, and recipes have all surfaced in recent work. One of the poems from my new manuscript, 'Brown-headed Cowbirds,' uses excerpts from a field guide. Another poem, 'Collage with Woodpecker and Broadsheet,' uses headlines from tabloids. Any rhetoric, so long as it has been discarded or overlooked in some way, might be juxtaposed to or incorporated into my poetry, magpie-style, in order to celebrate and renew voices not always heard (but overheard or unearthed), to surprise the reader into reevaluation and, possibly, revaluation.

"Language is a metaphor for us, for how we are unique, for how we are uniform."