Ben Hoffman
Photo by Ally Skong-Hoffman
Bio
Ben Hoffman’s fiction has been awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Prize, a Carol Houck Smith Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His stories appear in Granta, the Southern Review, the Missouri Review, the Sun, and other journals. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he lives in Chicago with his wife and son.
In the fall of 2019, many things—teaching, writing, my family’s health—were suddenly difficult, seemingly all at once. I felt overwhelmed, ripped away from my creative life. So we went into nature, as we ought to do more often, to try to reset. It halfway worked, too. We hiked the canyons of Starved Rock, which our son pretended were full of dinosaurs. And then, on heels of this calm, came an uplifting joy: as we drove back to Chicago, our son asleep in the backseat, Amy Stolls called with the news I’d been chosen as a Literature Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Any writer who wins an award is lucky. I recognize that many deserved this honor, and receiving it inspires me to work hard to justify it. Writing is solitary, and we are often plagued by self-doubt. I’m so deeply grateful for this gift, not only, of course, for the generous funding, but to be encouraged, to be told: yes, go back into that space.