HILMA WOLITZER was a late bloomer, and sometimes refers to herself as the Great Middle-Aged Hope. Her first novel was published when she was forty-four, although several short stories appeared earlier in periodicals such as Esquire and New American Review. She's published ten books, and has also written reviews, essays, and screenplays. Hilma was a longstanding member of Anatole Broyard's fiction workshop at The New School in Manhattan, but is generally self-taught as a writer, mainly through reading and listening. She's taught in several writing programs, including The University of Iowa Wtiters Workshop, Columbia University, New York University, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and has received fellowships and awards from The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters.

"There were only a few books in my childhood home, but many stories, and I've been eavesdropping ever since. Hungry for narrative, I was the kind of kid who read everything, from the back of the cereal box to the magnified label inside the shampoo bottle. Ignoring the edict to write about what I knew (which seemed to be nothing), I ground out ghastly poems in school about being blind, an unwed mother, and a refugee. The movies and comic books were important early influences, and my own work is often both episodic and visual. Although I still love a good story, character is usually at the heart of the fiction I most admire. I'm especially grateful to Jane Austen for presenting the world on a small canvas, to J.D. Salinger for taking the risk of sentimentality to achieve felt life, and to Henry Green, whose credo was, "If it happens, it matters."

hilma@worldnet.att.net

• Ending, Wm. Morrow, 1974
  
• In The Flesh, Wm. Morrow, 1977
  
• Hearts, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980
  
• In The Palomar Arms, FSG, 1983
  
• Silver, FSG, 1988
  
• Tunnel of Love, FSG, 1994
  
• Four Novels for Children, FSG, 1975, 76, 79, 83

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