Louise Hawes is an American academic and author of more than a dozen novels and several short story collections. She has served as Writer in Residence at the University of New Mexico and The Women's University of Mississippi, and as a John Grisham Visiting Writer at the University of Mississippi. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of South Florida, Staten Island College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Meredith College, and Duke University.
Winner of the New Jersey Author’s Award and two fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, Hawes helped found the nation's only MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College, and currently teaches on the faculty there. Her appearances as guest author, lecturer, and teacher have included sessions for the American Library Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, Associated Writing Programs, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Her short fiction has been included in Prentice Hall's fiction text The Reader Writes the Story (1995), Simon & Schuster's Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth (2001), Such a Pretty Face (Abrams, 2007), Be Careful What You Wish For (Scholastic, 2007), and Things I'll Never Say, Short Stories about Our Secret Selves (Candlewick/Walker Books, 2015). Individual stories have also appeared in the journals Other Voices, The Southerner, and Pisgah Review.