KATHERINE L. HESTER’S collection of stories Eggs for Young America was awarded the inaugural Bakeless Prize by author Francine Prose, selected by Barnes and Noble for its Discover New Writers promotion, and named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.  

Her short fiction has also appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Best American Mystery Stories, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Crazy Horse, Brain, Child, and elsewhere.  She has been a Dobie-Paisano and Hambidge Center Fellow and has held residencies also at the MacDowell Colony,  Yaddo, and the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.  

Hester’s New South  encompasses suburbia and nostalgia for a countryside once wild; her characters are continually surprised to find themselves on a domestic front where, beyond the edges of the maps they’ve been given, there might as easily be monsters as miracles.  

She was born in Dallas, Texas and raised in Athens, Georgia. Much of her life since has been spent shuttling back and forth between Texas and the deep(er) South. She received a Bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded two James A. Michener Fellowships in Writing.  She currently lives south of Interstate 20 in Atlanta, GA.