Official Bio

Holly Hilliard grew up in Hillsboro, Ohio. She received her BA from Duke University and her MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, where she was the winner of the 2018 James Hurst Prize for Fiction. She now lives with her husband and two cats in Pittsburgh, PA and spends her time writing, teaching, and birding.

Unofficial Bio

I’m Holly Hilliard from Hillsboro, Ohio, and I appreciate alliteration.

My hometown is in the Appalachian foothills and has a population of about 6,000 people. My school got a week off every year for the county fair, plus a day off for the first day of deer hunting season. I preferred choir, concert band, and reading books about dragons. I attended Duke University and surprised everyone by choosing to camp out in K-Ville for basketball tickets pretty much every spring. I also led student backpacking trips in a program called PWILD, and by the time my college career was over, I had spent an entire semester’s worth of time out in Pisgah National Forest.

I was an intern at One Story magazine and at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill before working as an assistant at a literary agency in NYC. I left publishing to work in the tech space doing legal operations, but my dream of being a writer could not be quashed (legal joke!). In 2019, I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, where I completed a short story collection and taught fiction workshops for undergrads. Then I got married and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I fell in love with birds, prairies, and ice skating and also started teaching adult writing classes, including an outdoor nature writing class, an experimental essay workshop, and introductory fiction writing. In 2023 my husband and I moved to Pittsburgh, PA, where I cobble together writing, editing, and teaching gigs and have enjoyed being a part of a thriving arts community. I’m currently hard at work on a novel and a short story collection.

When I’m not writing, I’m birding! I have many favorite birds, but today it’s the sandhill crane. Did you know the oldest confirmed sandhill crane fossil was found in Florida and is estimated to be 2.5 million years old?