Hilary Plum
Fiction & Creative Nonfiction | Cleveland State University
Contact
Phone | (216) 687-3923
Email | h.plum@csuohio.edu
Website | www.hilaryplum.com
Recent Publications
BOOKS
State Champ. Bloomsbury, 2025. Novel.
Important Groups. Community Mausoleum, 2025. Poetry chapbook.
Excisions. Black Lawrence Press, 2023. Poetry collection.
Hole Studies. Fonograf Editions, 2022. Essay collection.
Strawberry Fields. Winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Fence Books, 2018. Novel.
Watchfires. Awarded the 2018 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction. Rescue Press, 2016. Essay.
They Dragged Them Through the Streets. FC2, 2013. Novel.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Index for Continuance, podcast.
“Reading in the Conglomerate Era: Or, Do Small Presses Even Exist?” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2023. Review essay.
“Abortion Is Thinking. Thinking Is Banned,” Sultan’s Seal, 2022. Essay.
“The Loneliness of Sinead O’Connor,” Astra, 2022. Essay.
“Work, or the Swet Shop Boys.” Granta, September 2020, Essay.
“‘I planted the sun in the middle of the sky like a flag’: In and of Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse.” College Literature, July 2020, Article.
“Room after Room in The Report.” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 2020, Review.
About Hilary
Hilary Plum’s books of poetry and prose include the novel State Champ (Bloomsbury, 2025), the long poem Important Groups (Community Mausoleum, 2025), and the essay collection Hole Studies (Fonograf Editions, 2022). Her novel Strawberry Fields (2018) won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, and she has received a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction. Plum co-hosts the podcast Index for Continuance on small press publishing, politics, and practice, and she co-edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, the Massachusetts Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Where did you grow up?
New England, variously.
What is one of your favorite places in Cleveland?
Lakeview Cemetery, in the evening as you try to get to the gate before it closes. Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry. In the Syrian Cultural Garden when the roses are out. By the breakwater along Lake Erie when feral cats emerge from the rocks.
How do you respond when someone challenges the role of the MFA in creative writing?
The MFA offers an opportunity for sustained, engaged reading and writing: the committed practice of literature. This is of especial value in a culture that prefers the demands of production, distraction from the workings of power, and the confining sense of individualism from which reading liberates us. MFAs aren’t perfect institutions, and they’re not the only way to read and write rigorously. But they help nourish the work of literature, benefiting us all.
In two sentences or less what does the NEOMFA mean to you?
The NEOMFA is a site of energy, promise, engagement, and community here in Northeast Ohio, supporting regional writers and writing and connecting us to the endless realms of literature. I believe in what the program can offer students, writers, readers, teachers, publishers, booksellers, and the larger community.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
So far in 2022, I’ve been loving reading and rereading Free Clean Fill Dirt by Caryl Pagel, The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (trans. Katrina Dodson), PMS by Dot Devota, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara, Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin, Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette), Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (trans. Keith Gessen), and more I’m surely forgetting... I’m looking forward much to reading Maafa by Harmony Holiday, a new book of stories by Robin McLean out this fall, Our Dark Academia by Adrienne Raphel, and whatever’s next from detective novelists Denise Mina and Tana French…
Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts
Department of English
Cleveland State University
Music & Communications Building 234
2121 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44115
(216) 687-3957
info@neomfa.org
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