Official Bio & Headshot
Hilal Isler is a fiction writer; winner of the 2023/4 McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Creative Prose. She
is a 2021 Periplus Collective fellow, and the 2019 Roxane Gay Writing Fellow, with the Jack Jones Literary
Arts Association.
Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Brooklyn Review, New York magazine, and the Paris
Review, LA Review of Books, LitHub, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature online, and elsewhere. Her
short story, “Scorpion,” published in the Baltimore Review, was anthologized in 2023 Best Small Fictions.
She is a proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and a volunteer with the Penn Alumni
Ambassador Program since 2021.
Credit: Anna Min (2024)
Teaching
I’m thrilled to be joining the faculty at the University of Texas, at Austin, in the fall of 2025 —as an Associate Professor of Practice.
There, I will be teaching courses on restorative justice, through the College of Education. I’ll also be helping students as they go through their internship experience in the YCS program — innovating toward equitable communities of new knowledge and practice.