Hester Kaplan

Hester Kaplan is an award-winning writer of story collections, novels, and the memoir/biography, Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography, published in 2025 and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collection, The Edge of Marriage, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories series. She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards and was named a Quarry Farm Fellow by the Center for Mark Twain Studies for Twice Born.

With over 30 years of teaching experience, Hester runs workshops and writing retreats, and works one-on-one with writers at all stages of development. Recent presentations and features include a talk on memoir and biography at the 2025 Boston Book Festival, an interview on NPR’s Here & Now, and a discussion on biography at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In 2015, she co-founded Goat Hill Writers, a literary production company that brings a wide-range of literary programming to the public, and Write Rhode Island! a state-wide high school creative writing competition now in its tenth year of partnering with teachers, librarians, school administrators, and the community to champion the role of writing in our schools.