About

Hillary Behrman is an award-winning writer whose stories appear in New Ohio Review, The Madison Review, High Desert Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2020 Chris O’Malley Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award, and the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Prize. Her work can also be found in Muddy Backroads: Stories from Off the Beaten Path an anthology from Madville Publishing.

Her debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was chosen by Lauren Groff as the 2024 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction at Sarabande Books and will be published by Sarabande in May of 2026. The eighteen stories in the collection have been described as deeply humane and unsettling. 

Some of Hillary’s fictional writing is informed by her work as a leader in juvenile justice advocacy, children’s civil rights and criminal justice policy reform. She is an experienced educator who has conducted workshops across Washington State and nationally and has served as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington School of Law where she taught juvenile justice policy and lectured on special education and the school to prison pipeline. She worked for many years as the inaugural legal director at TeamChild and as a public defender. 

Hillary received her MFA in writing from Pacific University in 2021. She has a J.D from Georgetown University School of Law where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar, and she received her BA in English from Vassar College. 

Hillary grew up as the youngest of four children in a family that moved frequently crisscrossing much of the United States. Born in Baltimore, she lived in Portland, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland before she found her way to Washington State. Since making her home in Seattle as a queer woman in her 20s, she has raised two kids with her partner Steve, hiked countless miles, and regularly achieves “blackout” status on Seattle Public Library’s Book Bingo. She is currently working on her first novel.