Hannah Pittard

Hannah Pittard's fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, The Oxford American, The Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, and StoryQuarterly, and was included in 2008 Best American Short Stories' 100 Distinguished Stories. Her debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way (Ecco), has been praised by The Washington Post as "a wistful novel about how little we know of one another" and by O, The Oprah Magazine as "A stunning novel about making up stories as we go along...[a] mesmerizing debut." A perfect speaker for colleges and libraries, as well as common reading programs across the country, Pittard's presentations are imbued with the same poise and prose found in her novel.

The Fates Will Find Their Way begins with the disappearance of 16-year-old Nora Lindell. As the days and years add up, the mystery surrounding her disappearance lingers. The boys who befriended, revered, and lusted after her find themselves caught forever in the heady current of her absence. Their conflicting eyewitness accounts, told in the voice of an omniscient collective narrator (referred to only as "We") run up against divergent suspicions and projections, renewed regularly by sworn glimpses of the elusive Nora and the rumors they, in turn, inspire.

Born in Atlanta in 1978, Pittard moved with her family to Maryland when she was 13. She spent her first two years of college at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD, finishing school at the University of Chicago. After a four-year stint in Savannah teaching high school (part time) and working for a small newspaper (full time), she moved to Charlottesville, VA, for grad school in 2004, staying put until 2010 when she accepted a position teaching fiction at DePaul University. She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award.

The Fates Will Find Their Way

The Art and Craft of Fiction Writing

Fiction Workshop