Paula Whyman’s new book, Mad Land: Rediscovering the Wild, One Field at a Time, is forthcoming from Timber Press/Hachette Book Group. It’s a combination memoir, natural history, and conservation science, a chronicle of her attempts to restore native grasslands on a mountain farm. She has been awarded a 2023 residency and grant by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant to support her work on Mad Land.
Paula's first book was the linked short story collection You May See a Stranger, some of which was written at MacDowell in 2011. Her stories have also appeared in journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and The Southampton Review. Her fiction was selected for the anthology Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review. Her nonfiction has been featured on NPR, in the Washington Post, and in The Rumpus.
Whyman is currently serving a second term as Vice President of the MacDowell Fellows Executive Committee. She has also been in residence at Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, and VCCA. In 2016, she co-founded Scoundrel Time literary journal, where she is editor in chief.
Portrait by Curt Richter
