"O’Connor suffuses her imagined world with such feeling that readers live the pages more than read them." — Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Sheila O’Connor is the award-winning author of six novels. Her new genre-bending book for adults, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions, combines flash forms, archival documents, memoir, and historical research, to reconstruct the buried history of incarcerated girls. Honors for Evidence of V include the Minnesota Book Award, the Foreword Editor’s Choice Award, Marshall Project’s Best Criminal Justice Books of the year, as well as others. Her other books are Where No Gods Came and Tokens of Grace, and her novels for readers of all ages include Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth, Sparrow Road, and Keeping Safe the Stars.
Awards for her novels include the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, Minnesota Book Award, International Reading Award, and Midwest Booksellers Award among others. Her books have been included in Best Books of the Year by Booklist, VOYA, Book Page, Bank Street, Chicago Public Library, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers.
A multi-genre writer, her work has been anthologized in Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers, The Next Parish Over, Mothers and Daughters, and Under Purple Skies. Her short stories, poems, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies including New York Times, Bellingham Review, Minnesota Monthly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Brevity and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Poetry, Sheila O'Connor has been awarded two Bush Fellowships, Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants, and a McKnight Fellowship. She has been a residency fellow at Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tyrone Guthrie Center, and elsewhere. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Hamline University where she serves as fiction editor for Water~Stone Review. She is also a member of the core faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA Program.