Harper Aulick

About Harper Aulick

Harper Aulick is a West Virginia-based essayist who writes about family folklore, grief, memory and community. Often taking the form of flash and speculative nonfiction, her work frequently centers around the small things we grasp onto as we try to make sense of both personal and collective loss.

Harper is in her final semester at Marshall University where she will graduate with a B.A. in Creative Writing & Literary Studies. She is currently the editor-in-chief for Marshall’s Et Cetera literary magazine and moonlights as a nonfiction reader for the grief-based publication Months to Years.

When she isn’t writing, you can find her practicing one of her many other creative hobbies such as crochet, acting, sewing, collage-making, costume design, and SFX makeup.

Artist Statement

Harper’s essays live in the tension between her archival instinct to preserve the past and her love of the apocryphal, where she can explore what the discrepancies between emotional truths and empirical fact may reveal about our condition. It’s in this space where her experiences with both personal loss and Appalachian storytelling come together to form her interest in speculative nonfiction writing. Her essays primarily deal with community, grief, and memory, looking at what it means when our memories and emotional realities differ from a factual experience, especially as a result of trauma.