HOPE COULTER is a fiction writer and poet who directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language at Hendrix College. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, Southwest Review, and Terrain, and her collection The Wheel of Light was published in 2015 as part of the New Poets Series of BrickHouse Books. Her novels The Errand of the Eye and Dry Bones were published in 1988 and 1990 by August House Publishers, and her children’s picture book, Uncle Chuck’s Truck, came out in 1993 from Bradbury Press. Awards for her writing include the Laman Library Writers Fellowship, the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, and four Pushcart nominations. Hope has been named co-winner of the 2022 Meringoff Writing Award in poetry, awarded by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, and will read her winning poems at the ALSCW’s annual conference this fall.
Hope was born in New Orleans and grew up in the central Louisiana city of Alexandria, attending public schools and graduating from Alexandria Senior High School. She earned her AB in English from Harvard University and her MFA in fiction and poetry from Queens University of Charlotte. She has taught creative writing at Hendrix College since 1993 and since 2013 has also headed the campus-based literature and language foundation. Hope lives in Little Rock with her husband, nature and travel writer Mel White (Hendrix ’72), and their yellow lab mix, Josie.