Alumni Spotlight: Hillary Jordan '04
The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.
Hillary Jordan ’04 is an internationally-bestselling author, screenwriter, public speaker, and writing teacher. Her two novels, Mudbound and When She Woke, have been translated into 16 languages. Mudbound won multiple awards, including the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Conscious Fiction and an Alex Award from the American Library Association. The film adaptation, starring Carey Mulligan and Mary J. Blige, premiered at Sundance to critical acclaim and went on to earn four Academy Award nominations. Hillary is also the co-editor and co-creator, with Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, of Anonymous Sex, a collection of literary erotica by prize-winning authors.
Hillary’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Outside Magazine, PASTE, and Elle. She is represented for screenwriting by Anonymous Content and is a member of the Writers Guild of America East.
She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia and a BA from Wellesley. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, along with half the writers in America.
Was there a specific faculty member or peer that especially inspired you while at the School of the Arts? If so, who and how?
Jennifer Cody Epstein '03 and I connected on our very first day at Columbia. As women in our 30s, we were among the oldest students in our class, and we were relieved to see each other’s faces at orientation! We became each other’s trusted readers, and we both went on to write historical first novels far outside our own personal experience: Jenn’s, The Painter from Shanghai, about a Chinese woman who rose out of prostitution to become a celebrated painter, and mine, Mudbound, about black sharecroppers and their white landlords in Jim Crow Mississippi. These stories required big, scary leaps, and I think the fact that we were doing it together and cheering each other on gave us courage. Jenn has read multiple drafts of everything I’ve ever written, and vice versa.
I will also add that I had outstanding female workshop instructors, several of whom—Maureen Howard, Victoria Redel and Binnie Kirshenbaum— became mentors and friends.
What were the most pressing social/political issues on the minds of the students when you were here?
Because of work obligations, I took five semesters to complete my classwork at SoA. I started in fall 1999, at the end of the Clinton era. When Bush was elected a year later, we were all concerned about the new brand of strident conservatism that was on the ascendance, but then in September of 2001 the world was turned upside down, and all checks and balances on the power of the right were lost. We started a senseless war in Iraq, while at home, we began to see infringements on civil rights in the name of patriotism and national security, a rise in religious fundamentalism, the muddying of the line between church and state, and widespread attacks on women’s reproductive freedom. I wrote my second, dystopian novel, When She Woke, out of a sense of outrage and alarm over the abuses of power and weakening of democracy that happened post-9/11.