David Brendan Hopes, whose novel The Falls of the Wyona was chosen for Red Hen Press’s 2017 Quill Prize, is a poet, playwright, and painter living in Asheville, North Carolina. Originally from Ohio, Hopes taught at Hiram College, Syracuse University, Phillips Exeter Academy, and is now Professor of English at UNCA. His prize-winning plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Seattle, and London, and his publications have been in venues as diverse as Audubon, the New Yorker, and Best American Poetry, 2016.
Previous full-length publications include The Glacier’s Daughters (Juniper Prize, UMass Press), Blood Rose (Urthona Press), A Dream of Adonis (Pecan Grove Press), and Peniel (Saint Julian Press). Nonfiction publications include: A Sense of the Morning (Milkweed Editions), Bird Songs of the Mesozoic (Milkweed Editions), and A Childhood in the Milky Way (Akron University Press). He has twice received the North Carolina New Play Project Prize, as well as the Holland New Voices Play-writing Award, the Sprenger Foundation Award for Historical Drama, the Desert Star Award for Best Original Writing, the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Award for Playwriting, and the Siena Playwrights’ Prize. Previously in fiction, he has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, the E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award, the Sonora Review Fiction Prize, and the Hohenburg Award in Fiction. Poetry accolades include the Juniper Prize, the Saxifrage Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Prize, and the Utmost Christian Writers Christian Poetry Award.