About Meredith Hall

“I am a narrative writer. I love writing story. Creative nonfiction allows the writer to embed experiences and responses, relationships, moments of transition or insight in a narrative structure. This is where we live our lives—in the concrete world, a world carried in memory like fabric woven from place, people, time.”

Meredith Hall draws on her remarkable life to build stories, but these stories do much more than entertain. She has a way of maneuvering her moments, experiences, and emotions to stir readers with a beautiful, and often painful, perspective.

“Every day as I write, my words come slowly, with care and often pain. I love those words, tend them, and remember as each one leaves me and becomes the story that I am both honored and burdened with this work,” she says.

Incredibly, Hall did not write a word until the age of 52. She raised two children much on her own and struggled financially all her life—at times running a small farm, cleaning houses, even sanding sheetrock. After her children had grown, she acquired two degrees from Bowdoin College in Maine, and accepted a faculty position at the University of New Hampshire. Her first story, “Killing Chickens,” was published in Creative Nonfiction. Her second story, “Shunned,” about her teenage pregnancy in a conservative New England community, won the 2005 Pushcart Prize, and was included as a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2005.

Not until the Gift of Freedom Award, however, was Ms. Hall able to write full time:

“I write in my head in the car on my way to work, in the quiet moments in the classroom, or in bed at the end of a tiring day of work. I remember the Gift of Freedom and suddenly I realize I am not a woman dreaming of becoming a writer. I am a woman writer.”

During her grant period, Ms. Hall completed her first memoir titled Without a Map. It was published by Beacon Press in Spring, 2007. Without a Map was highly acclaimed in more than eighteen magazines and newspapers including People Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and was listed on the New York Times Extended Bookseller List twice. Ms. Hall’s work continues to appear in publications such as The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, and The Prairie Schooner, as well as, in the recent anthology, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, edited by Kim Barnes and Claire Davis. Without a Map continued to receive recognition by winning the Maine Literary Award for best book of 2007. Both Barnes & Nobles and Borders recently selected Without a Map as their front-end “New Paperbacks” display nationwide for one month. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2004 for “Shunned,” was a 2005 Rona Jaffe Award finalist and won the Maine Arts Commission’s 2005 Individual Artist Fellowship, a grant of $13,000.