Elisabeth Sheffield

During her residency Elisabeth Sheffield is working on a new novel that deals with characters who have congenital disabilities and with the evolution of genomic knowledge.

 She is the author of three previous novels, and the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Award for Literature, as well as two Fulbright Fellowships. Currently, she is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. In Fort Da: A Report, an American neuroscientist, working at a sleep lab in Germany, falls in love with an eleven-year old Turkish Cypriot boy. Presented as an “objective report” of one woman’s illicit obsession, Fort Da is ultimately an exploration of language, reality and the mind. Helen Keller Really Lived uses doctor and technician characters (both living and deceased!), as well as areas of medical research and technology—embryology and A.R.T.—to investigate ontological and ethical issues, including the question of what it means “to really live.”