Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.
From her home in Winston-Salem, Halle Hill writes about outsiders, a label she knows well. Despite growing up in a tight-knit Seventh-day Adventist community in east Tennessee, Hill often felt out of place, especially as a Black native of Appalachia.
“My people have been in Appalachia forever,” she says, “but it sometimes felt like we were this little group of aliens trying to make it together as a family.”
Hill investigated questions of belonging while studying religion in college. She found that fiction allowed her to explore the way she’d always felt as someone who both belonged to and sensed exclusion from a particular identity — and discovered that this character tension makes good stories.
“Sometimes it’s really good to be a stranger,” she says, smiling.
After graduating college in 2017, Hill entered the MFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she’d spend the next two years writing fiction about women living as outsiders, which was exactly how she felt being so far from home, especially as she learned more about Savannah’s history.
One night on a ghost tour, the guide explained how enslaved people paved the city streets with cobblestones. According to the guide, if someone died from exhaustion, their body was sometimes left on the street. Hill couldn’t shake this image. She began writing a story about a young Black woman whose gay brother is the victim of police violence in Savannah.
“I was wrestling with my own queerness at the time,” she says. “And I was thinking about what it means for a man to be beautiful in a way that’s non-traditional, and how beauty can be a danger.”
Hill entered this story into the 2020 debut fiction call at Oxford American. When her work was published, it caught the attention of Kate McMullen, associate publisher of Hub City Press in Spartanburg, South Carolina. McMullen reached out to Hill and asked if she had more to share.
Three years later, Hill’s collection of stories, Good Women, was released with the support of the Cold Mountain Fund in partnership with Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain. The book received the kind of praise rare for story collections, especially debuts: It was named as one of the Best Short Story Collections of 2023 by Oprah Daily and Best Fiction Books of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
Hill now works in community engagement and communications at Wake Forest University. Last year at a colleague’s birthday party, she met Claire Crawford, the new political science professor on campus.
“I’d heard all about this young professor who just finished her Ph.D. at USC, and I was like, ‘I’m an Appalachian! I don’t need to meet the California bigwig!’”
Nevertheless, they’ve spent every day together since, bonded by a shared love of books and literary theory.
Crawford proposed to Hill in Old Salem by St. Philips, the Black Moravian church, one of Hill’s favorite places. Not long after, Hill proposed, too, popping the question at Bookmarks, an independent bookstore downtown.
“I’ve always been a solitary person,” Hill says, “but I’ve learned that you can’t change alone. Winston’s been good to me and has allowed me an opportunity to metabolize all of my parts. And North Carolina is my favorite southern state,” she says.
You can’t blame her for feeling this way. After all, our state is where so many things have come together for Hill: work, life, literature, and love. The outsider has made it home.
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photograph by Matt Hulsman
The 12 protagonists in Halle Hill’s debut story collection, Good Women, live in a state of transition, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually. In “Seeking Arrangements,” a young Black woman is on a bus to Florida with a much older, infirmed white man, wondering if his family will accept her while questioning if she deserves more from life. “Honest Work” is about a state fair employee contending with her feelings about both her mother’s sordid employment and the hypocritical religiosity of one of her mother’s clients. In “Skin Hunger,” a woman is pressured toward pregnancy by her husband and the social members of their church group, and she wonders if becoming a mother would finally offer her a sense of belonging. These stories are full of the pain of isolation and the beauty of the moment when we realize that our sense of self might be the most important community we can find.
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