Laurie Sheck’s most recent novel is Cyborg Fever (June 2025). Her novel, A Monster’s Notes, was long-listed for the Dublin International Fiction Prize, and her book of poems, The Willow Grove, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her poems and prose have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Atlantic and Granta online, and elsewhere. A 2023 recipient of a Literature Award from the Creative Capital Foundation, she has taught at Princeton, Rutgers, and Columbia, and is currently on the MFA Writing Faculty at the New School. She lives in New York City. Email: lasheck3 [at] gmail.com
by Laurie Sheck 1. A monster disrupts accepted systems of meaning. Unsettles certainties. Dismantles familiar definitions. Wounds and scars them. Brings into the world a sense of dread, excitement, crisis. It appears at the seams and boundaries of existing things: human/animal; sentient/machine; natural/artificial, and reveals those seams as fragile, provisional, ambiguous, porous. A monster lives…
by Laurie Sheck 1. In his 1980 essay Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes looking out at Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Viewed from above, the city is “a wave of verticals. Its agitation momentarily arrested…The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes.” From that vantage point, the…
by Laurie Sheck 1. Always when I think of him, I picture him alone in a room, bedridden for months at a time. How from late childhood on, he suffered from osteomyelitis, an incurable infection of the bone that set flame to raw nerve fibers, induced recurring fevers, skin lesions, intense, crippling pain. And how…
by Laurie Sheck 1. In her 1925 essay, On Being Ill, written when she was 42 years old, Virginia Woolf speaks of the spiritual change that illness often brings, how it can lead one into areas of extremity, wonder, isolation. “How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undisclosed countries that are then…
by Laurie Sheck 1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful it…
by Laurie Sheck For the past couple of decades, I have been a member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the New School in New York City. Before that I taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia and CUNY. I have had many remarkable students, among them the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Diaz who I…
by Laurie Sheck 1.In the summer of 1977 in New York City—summer of the famous city-wide blackout, its fires and looting—my parents stole a street sign. The sign marked the location of my father’s housewares store which overnight had been turned into a hollow shell of blackened ash and charred brick. Looted and burned. The…
by Laurie Sheck 1. It has been over 200 years since Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in the stormy summer of 1816. Although she was only eighteen, she had already lost one child just days after giving birth; her second child, William, was a few months old. By the time Frankenstein was published, in 1818,…
by Laurie Sheck 1.In the garden of the Maui home where the poet W.S. Merwin lived for the last forty years of his life, writing and translating poems, and restoring deforested land into a flourishing palm forest, there is a black stone marker engraved with his name and that of his wife, along with the…
by Laurie Sheck 1. Years ago, when my daughter was five, we spent a day at the Barcelona Zoo. As I held her small hand in mine, we stood before a cage in which a large albino gorilla resolutely turned his face from us. If we moved to the right, he turned his face to…
by Laurie Sheck 1. In March 2023, Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish government, officially apologized for Scotland’s policy from the 1940’s to the 1970’s of forcing tens of thousands of unmarried women to give up their newborns for adoption. Shortly after giving birth and without informed consent, many of the women were required…