Discipline: Literature – fiction

Kathleen Hill

Discipline: Literature – fiction
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1987, 2001
More: www.kathleenhillwriter.com
Kathleen Hill is an American writer, Hill wrote Still Waters in Niger, a novel that is set in the Sahel in a time of famine. It is centered in the complicated bonds between mothers and daughters and the will to survive in a place where the children are starving. Published in 1999, it was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, and was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Award. The French translation, Eaux Tranquilles, was short-listed for the Prix Femina Étranger. Hill’s most recent work is a memoir, She Read to us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels. It was born out of Hill’s realization that her own strongest memories of a time and place were almost always illuminated by a novel she’d been reading at the time. The first chapter of the memoir, “Lucy Gayheart,” was originally published as “The Anointed” and reprinted in Best American Short Stories as well as Pushcart Prize XXV, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. “Portrait,” an earlier version of the second and third chapters of the memoir, first appeared in the Ploughshares Solo Series (2014), 27, and the Amazon Kindle edition was selected as One of the Best Singles of 2014. A short essay, “Forgiveness,” published first in AGNI, was reprinted in The Best Spiritual Writing, 2013. Hill’s essay on the Irish fiction writer, Maeve Brennan, will appear in Nine Irish Lives, edited by Mark Bailey, March 2018.

Studios

Wood

Kathleen Hill worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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