Short story writer Halle Hill

Good Women, the debut short story collection from Halle Hill, has been recognized as a Kirkus ReviewsBest Books of 2023 in Fiction, one of Oprah Daily’s Best Books of the Year, one of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of 2023, a People Magazine Best Books of Fall, one of the Boston Globe’s 20 Books We’re Excited to Read This Fall, and a Poets & Writer’s “Page One” New and Noteworthy Book.

The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with Hill on Thursday, December 7, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St.). Copies of Good Women will be available for sale and signing. Please register in advance at 843-379-7025.

“In Halle Hill’s Good Women, we meet mothers and daughters, lovers and friends, saints and aint’s––all longing for something, some place, someone. They are curious, messy, and determined, and Hill’s fierce and dazzling pen lets us feel every ounce of their complicated desires. Every mistake, every realization, every triumph, every tragedy. This is a fantastic firecracker of a collection I’ll return to again and again!”—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“This heralds a bright new talent.”—Publishers Weekly

In this dynamic debut, Hill delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he’s seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living. Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries―or lack thereof―influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect.

Halle Hill is from East Tennessee and lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A graduate of Maryville College and the M.F.A. Writing program at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), she is the winner of the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize and was a finalist for the 2021 ASME Award for Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Joyland, New Limestone Review, Southwest Review, and The Oxford American, where she won the 2020 Debut Fiction Prize.

Learn more about the Pat Conroy Literary Center at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.