Hope Coulter

is a fiction writer and poet whose work has appeared in such journals as New Delta Review, North American Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and Rattle. She has been a Pushcart nominee (2008), a runner-up for Spoon River Poetry Review’s Editors’ Prize and New Delta Review’s Matt Clark Poetry Prize (2007), a finalist in the Great American Novel Contest (2002), and a semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest (2008). Other honors include Arkansas’s Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, the Short Story Award of Louisiana Life magazine, and a residency at the Dairy Hollow Writers’ Colony.

Hope was born in New Orleans and spent her early childhood in Little Rock, then moved at age five to Alexandria, Louisiana, where she attended public schools. She received her A.B. from Harvard and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She lives in Little Rock and teaches at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

NEWS!

Hope is second-place winner of the Morton Marr Prize. SMU's Southwest Review will make the official announcement in December, and her poem "Herbie K's" will be published in February. Contest judge J.D. McClatchy writes, "This poem’s assured technique is deftly, at times hilariously, put in service to a nostalgia that captures both the sour sweetness of adolescence and the dawning darkness of adulthood. Details are spot-on. Tone is expertly managed. The result is stand-up ubi sunt."

Hope's story "The Hurricane" made landfall at Terrain, having placed third in their annual contest. Read it at the link to your right.

Her poem “Lyrebird” was published in the spring issue of Town Creek Poetry, and “The Burial” enjoyed a week as the featured poem at Heron Tree before retiring to the archives there.

A third poem, "The Supplicant," is forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly this month.

Hope works at Hendrix College as Interim Director of the Hendrix-Murphy Programs in Literature & Language and as a member of the English Department. This fall she's teaching two courses, "Creative Writing: Poetry" and "The Writer as Witness."