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Photo credit: Mo Saito

About Hilary

Hilary Zaid is the winner of the 2024 Publishing Triangle's Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award. Hilary has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a James D. Houston Fellow at the Community of Writers and two-time attendee of Tin House Writers' Workshop. Hilary's work has appeared in Mother Jones, Ecotone, Day One, Lilith Magazine and elsewhere. Long-listed for the 2018 Northern California Independent Booksellers' Award for Fiction, her novel Paper is White is a 2018 Foreword Indies silver medalist and the winner of the 2018 Independent Publishers' Book Awards (IPPY) in LGBT+ Fiction. Her novel Forget I Told You This (Zero Street Fiction), is the inaugural winner of the Barbara DiBernard Award and a current finalist for the 2023 Northern California Book Award.

Hilary has mentored aspiring writers through AWP's Writer-to-Writer Mentor program, the Golden Crown Literary Society and as a volunteer mentor and mentor-coordinator of the College Essay Mentors in the Oakland Unified School District, an equity program serving high school seniors from diverse backgrounds. Hilary served as a a judge of the 2023 Barbara Deming Money For Women literary prize.