Terence Hawkins

Terence Hawkins is the founding Director of the Yale Writers' Conference. Begun in 2012, it now brings three hundred writers to the Yale campus. It was recently ranked among the five best such programs in the country. His second novel, American Neolithic, was named a Kirkus Reviews Indie Best of 2014. In a starred review, it was called "a towering work of speculative fiction." His first book, The Rage of Achilles, is a novelization of the Iliad in modern, graphic prose. Tom Perrotta called it "a genuinely fresh take on a classic text;" Richard Selzer, "masterful." Hawkins grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. His home county, which the state police call Fayette Nam, is the setting for Philipp Meyer's American Rust and the original Night of the Living Dead. His grandfathers and several uncles were coal miners. He graduated from Yale, where he was publisher of the Yale Daily News. He attended the University of Wisconsin Law School and returned to New Haven in 1985 to practice as a trial lawyer. He now writes and teaches full time.