Paula Whyman’s new book, MAD LAND: Rediscovering the Wild, One Field at a Time, is forthcoming from Timber Press. It’s a combination memoir, natural history, and conservation science, a chronicle of her attempts to restore retired farmland to natural habitat. Her first book, the linked story collection YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER, won praise from The New Yorker, a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and was awarded the Towson Prize for Literature. Paula was selected for “Best of 2016” lists including Chicago Review of Books and “35 Over 35,” as well as the first-ever Poets & Writers Magazine “5 Over 50” list. A New Pages review called You May See a Stranger “hauntingly universal” and “soul-stirring.” Paula’s writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, VQR, The Washington Post, and on NPR. Paula has taught in writers-in-schools programs through the Pen/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, DC, and The Hudson Review in Harlem and the Bronx, New York. She is Vice President of the MacDowell Fellows Executive Committee and a fellow of MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, and The Studios of Key West. She was recently awarded a 2022 Creativity Grant by the Maryland State Arts Council to support work on MAD LAND. Paula is co-founder and editor in chief of Scoundrel Time literary journal.