Author Profile

Graham Hillard

Graham Hillard joined the Martin Center in the spring of 2022 after fifteen years at Trevecca Nazarene University, where he taught creative writing, literature, and composition. He holds a bachelor’s degree in communication arts from Union University and an MFA in creative writing from New York University.

Hillard’s opinion pieces and articles have appeared widely, in such venues as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Memphis: The City Magazine, The Oxford American, and The Weekly Standard. He has written on many occasions for National Review and is a contributing writer for the Washington Examiner, where he writes about film and television. On two occasions, his work has been listed among the year’s “notables” in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Essays anthology. He was a finalist for the 2012 Livingston Award for Young Journalists in the “local reporting” category and the recipient of a 2017 individual artist fellowship for poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

In addition to his duties at the Martin Center, Hillard is the founding editor of the Cumberland River Review, a digital literary quarterly. His first book of poems, Wolf Intervals, was published in the Poiema Poetry Series (Cascade Books) in 2022. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and children.

Articles by Graham Hillard



“Updated Mission Statements, Comrade!”

University mission statements are the cell phone user contracts of higher-ed prose. Committee-generated and loved by none, they sit awkwardly on webpages and internal reports, awaiting readers to justify their…