Mairead Small Staid is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she was the Geoge Bennett Fellow. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, The Believer, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Minnesota.

“A stunning exploration of happiness and memory. These brilliant, beautiful essays challenged and delighted me. A transcendent debut.” —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half“Lyric and enigmatic, The Traces hints at every turn some imminent parting of the veils. Mairead Small Staid wraps her personal narrative in rich speculative cloth. Italy crowds the senses. Reading, I remembered my delight as a child watching iron filings moving slowly into design as the magnet approached the sheet of paper from below.” —Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age“Mairead Small Staid is an exceptionally delightful critic, with a lavish, forceful intellect and a style marked by cross-disciplinary ignition and pointillistic grace. In The Traces, which is the kind of book that'll be passed around like a good secret, she pursues happiness as a magic aberration, a subject as fraught and consequential as its well-trod opposite. Immortalizing one golden season in Florence, she captures the flux of her own personhood and potential—and ours, too—under the influence of time, art, weather, love, and chance.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror