Aurelie Sheehan, author, creative writing professor and former head of the University of Arizona’s English department, has died. She was 60.
Sheehan died in her Tucson home Aug. 4 after an eight-month battle with brain cancer, her family told the Star.
Born on June 16, 1963, in Verdun, France, Sheehan was the oldest of two children to Valeria Harms and her late father, Laurence Francis Sheehan, who was serving in the U.S. Army at the time. Upon returning to the United States the family settled in Connecticut.
Sheehan graduated in 1984 from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She then earned a master’s degree from The City College of CUNY in New York in 1990.
In 2000, Sheehan came to the University of Arizona, becoming a full-time professor and spending the last four-and-a-half years as head of the English department before stepping down in December.
Prior to her arrival, she taught at Sheridan College, City College as well as in the part-time graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University.
Sheehan was also the coordinator of the artist and writers residency program at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. And she spent three years running the Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Her published novels include “The Anxiety of Everyday Objects” and “History Lesson for Girls,” short story collections “Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant” and “Demigods on Speedway,” the novella “This Blue” as well as two books of prose poems, “Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories” and “Once into the Night.”
“A lover of all creatures four-legged or finned, Sheehan said if she hadn’t become a teacher she might have been a veterinarian,” husband Reed Karaim said in an obituary emailed to the Star. “She was an enthusiastic if intermittent gardener, an avid movie-goer, a swimmer, painter and lifelong, voracious reader who ended nearly every day with a book in her hands.”
Aurelie Sheehan (right), poses with her husband Reed Kairam and daughter Alexandra Karaim while in Madrid, Spain, in 2022.
Sheehan is survived by Reed Karaim, her husband of 25 years, daughter Alexandra Karaim, mother Valerie Harms, brother Alex “Pippa” Sheehan, as well as many in-laws, nieces and nephews.
