Shena McAuliffe
Shena McAuliffe is the author of The Good Echo: A Novel (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and Glass Light Electricity: Essays (University of Alaska, 2020). Her short stories and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She earned a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and an MFA in Fiction Writing at Washington University in St. Louis. She grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado, and now lives in Schenectady, New York, where she is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of English at Union College.
Winner of the 2022 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction
ISBN 978-1-950413-61-4 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-950413-62-1 (hardcover)
8.5 x 5.5 inches, 186 pages
“We Are a Teeming Wilderness is the rare book that belongs both on the high shelf of the connoisseur and at the top of the stack on anyone's bedside table. These stories imagine the past with a keen awareness of the present, and vice versa. The result is a collection of characters—from microorganisms to hosiery salesmen to clairvoyants—who are bizarre, familiar, pathological, comic, sympathetic, foolish, and wise, sometimes all at once. Reading to escape, I found myself transported to near and distant pasts and speculative realities. Reading to learn, I found myself captivated by anthropologies at once historical, mythic, scientific, and intimately personal. Reading to enjoy, I had a plain good time; whatever readers are looking for when they pick up these stories, they’ll find more than they expect, which is the wonderful surprise of any great book.” —Claire V. Foxx, Press 53 Short Fiction Editor