The Gates of Evangeline

She attended Tufts University, majoring in English and minoring in Latin American studies. Hester spent a year abroad studying at University College London, where she fell in love with geeky courses in phonology and English syntax and grammar, despite her British phonology professor forever mocking her for pronouncing the “r” in her own name.

Eager to escape the harsh winters of her native New England, she moved to Tucson after college. By day, she worked as a preschool teacher in a bilingual Headstart classroom; by night, she served as a relay operator for the deaf. She eventually left the Arizona desert to attend the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Although her two years on the island of Oahu did produce a Masters degree in English, she remembers them mainly as time spent scuba-diving, singing karaoke with her Japanese roommate, and failing, in spectacular fashion, to surf. (Her ill-fated surfing attempt and its resulting scars surprised no one, given Hester’s lifelong struggle to operate in three-dimensional space.) She also wrote a lot of fiction, with windows open and geckos singing to her from the folds of the curtains.

Following graduation, Hester returned to the east coast and began a five-year stint in southern New Hampshire as a high school English teacher. From her adventures teaching teenagers the art of fiction writing, she learned more than in all her previous years of higher ed. She currently resides in New Jersey with her husband and two young children, writing full-time whenever her children are not home sick or snow-bound or on school vacation or a holiday, i.e. not nearly enough. Hester spends November to February of each year wondering why she ever left Hawai’i.