The following story originally appeared on the website for the Charles Center. – Ed.

Hilary Holladay M.A. ’87, an accomplished poet, novelist, biographer and journalist, is the William & Mary Charles Center’s inaugural Sharp Writer-in-Residence, teaching Writing & Reporting the News (WRIT 401) in the English department this fall. 
 
Holladay was delighted by the opportunity to apply for the Sharp Writer-in-Residence position, which was created by Anne and Barry Sharp, who also support the Charles Center’s Sharp Journalism Seminar in collaboration with the D.C.-based Pulitzer Center.  

“I’d always wanted to teach here, and I never really thought that it would happen.”

Holladay completed her master’s in English at William & Mary in 1987. From her perspective, the school has both changed and remained the same.

“The bones of this beautiful place are the same,” she says, “but there are new buildings, new additions and many, many new faces. So I feel both a real familiarity and a renewal of my love for this campus and this place. And also a sort of new kid’s wide-eyed, wow factor.” She paused. “Somehow everybody’s younger.”

When asked if she felt that her focus on American poetry and poets was linked to her new residency at the Alma Mater of the Nation, Holladay laughed.

“I will now claim that,” she said. “That’s the connection I’ve been looking for.”

Holladay was born just outside of Richmond in Glen Allen, Virginia, where she lived for eight years before moving to Pennsylvania with her family.

“Because we were in Pennsylvania, and we would come back here to see family, I developed a real sort of nostalgic love of Virginia,” she said.

In 1983 she graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English. Her parents had retired to her father’s hometown of Orange, Virginia, and she jumped at the opportunity to once again call Virginia home.

She found an opening at Orange County Review, a local newspaper, where she worked for less than a year before moving to the bigger, Fredericksburg-based Free Lance-Star.

Despite her budding journalism career, Holladay says she never lost sight of her graduate school aspirations.

“It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a professor,” she said, “I just wanted a degree. I wanted to immerse myself in reading more literature and just having these conversations about it.”

At W&M, Holladay studied English with a concentration in modern and contemporary American literature. Her mother and older sister had also studied here.   

After finishing her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Holladay taught English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell — the birthplace of American literary figure Jack Kerouac.  

“I didn’t know much about Kerouac or the Beat Movement, but I learned a lot very quickly,” Holladay said.  

As a professor, she founded the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies and ran a series of conferences on Kerouac and Beat literature.   

Holladay moved back to Virginia in 2008, where she continued to lecture and work in universities. After publishing her second book, “Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton in 2012,” Holladay realized her true calling was as a biographer.   

“The book I did on [Clifton] was mostly analysis of her poetry, but I included an interview with her in the back, and then after that I got more and more into biography.” Biography, she said, combines her two favorite things: literary criticism and journalism.  

“I really wish I had come into biography writing sooner than I did,” she admitted. “Once I got into it, it was so obvious that this is what I should have been doing all along.”   

Now she specializes in biographies of modern and contemporary writers — particularly female poets. In 2020 Holladay gained national recognition for her biography of Adrienne Rich, The Power of Adrienne Rich, which offered a fresh, comprehensive look at a poet whose legacy had long been dismissed.  

After several years of freelance and lecturing, Holladay returned to the Orange County Review, but within a few years it had become what she calls a “ghost paper,” containing very little local content or focus.   

“When I left, just three years later, I hugged my editor goodbye. He was the only one there,” she recalled.  

Soon, there was no source of local news in Orange. Holladay heard her neighbors and friends mourning the loss of community journalism, and in response, she started the news column Byrd Street on Substack.   
 
“I thought, ‘I can’t write a whole newspaper,’ but I discovered Substack, and I thought, ‘I can do this. I can’t give people everything, but I can provide some news, I can cover the politics, I can get some people to help me with taking pictures. It’s something,’” she explained.  
  
Holladay says she’s considered how her career may be different had she continued with journalism the first time but nonetheless has no regrets.   
  
“I love small-town journalism. It’s slow and it’s time-consuming to do journalism the way I do it, but this is what I like to do. I’ve been trying even harder lately not to let my assumptions get in the way of a good conversation,” Holladay said.  
  
As the Sharp Writer-in-Residence, she hopes to open students’ eyes to the importance of open-mindedness and withholding assumptions.  
 
“I would like for my students to realize how far their creativity and powers of observation and open-mindedness can get them,” she said.   
  
Holladay finds herself continuously drawn to American culture and how poets and writers have interpreted and renegotiated what it means to them.   
  
“It’s interesting when I read poets to see how they deal with being an American,” she explained. “With Adrienne Rich, she became very conflicted about her American identity. And then in her later years, it seemed like she was shifting and changing and looking back to Walt Whitman, and in some ways becoming more comfortable with that identity and seeing it as something larger than just the categories that made her angry.”  
  
The complexity of American identity is a binding thread in both the Beat generation’s writers — like Kerouac — as well as the contemporary poets she teaches.  
 
“It’s hard to study literature in a vacuum, I can say that, and so it is really important to look at the culture,” she said. “To me, that’s part of the appeal of really good American literature, just that feeling of clarity and immersion in our culture.”  
  
As a teacher and writer, Holladay thinks the best way to encourage open-mindedness and combat easily made misassumptions is to represent authors from diverse backgrounds.  
 
“I believe in fairness and balance,” she said. “I know how important it is to give people a whole buffet of writers to read and think about, writers from different places, writers of different races and ethnicities, and male and female, straight, gay, whatever definition it might be.”  
 
The author’s background isn’t necessarily the point, she argues: “In some ways, that’s secondary. But you wouldn’t want to not give people that opportunity.”  
  
Her most recent project is still in the works: a biography of American poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück, who died in 2023.   
  
Keeping an open mind toward her teaching experience this semester, Holladay hopes students are as creatively fueled, engaged, and inspired as ever. “When you think that the history goes back to 1693, I think there’s something really moving about this long history.”  
  
As she returns to her alma mater, an author committed to keeping records and an open mind asks: “What could be more exciting in an environment like this than to be fully awake and open to experience all the possibilities?”  
 
Interested in meeting Holladay and learning about her journey as a journalist, poet, novelist and biographer? The Department of English and the Charles Center are co-hosting a special public interview with Holladay to discuss journalism and biography at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 28 in Tucker Hall Theatre.

The discussion will be moderated by next semester’s Sharp Writer-in-Residence David Price, is free of charge, and will be followed by a reception. All are welcome.