About Alyson Hagy

Alyson Hagy grew up with on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  She is a graduate of Williams College (’82) where she twice won the Benjamin Wainwright Prize for her fiction and completed an Honors thesis under the direction of Richard Ford.  She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan (’85) working with George Garrett, Alan Cheuse, and Janet Kauffman.  While at Michigan, she was awarded a Hopwood Prize in Short Fiction and a Roy Cowden Fellowship.  Early stories were published in Sewanee Review, Crescent Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.  In 1986, Stuart Wright published her first collection of fiction, Madonna On Her Back.

Hagy taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and the Stonecoast Writers Conference before moving to the Rocky Mountains and joining the faculty at the University of Wyoming in 1996.  She is the author of eight works of fiction, including Hardware River (Poseidon Press, 1991), Keeneland (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Graveyard of the Atlantic (Graywolf Press, 2000), Snow, Ashes (Graywolf Press, 2007), Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press, 2010), Boleto (Graywolf Press, 2012), and Scribe (Graywolf Press, 2018).  She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.  Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, the High Plains Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Award, the Syndicated Fiction Award, and been included in Best American Short Stories.  Recent fiction has appeared in Drunken Boat, The Idaho Review, Kenyon Review, INCH, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Hagy has been represented by Gail Hochman of Brandt & Hochman since the 1980s.  Fiona McCrae and Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press have been her publisher and editor since the late 1990s.  Abiding interests and transgressions include hiking, fishing, tennis, cohabitating with Labrador Retrievers, college athletics, and making artist’s books.  She lives in Laramie, Wyoming with her husband Robert Southard.  They have one son, Connor.