Virtual Author Series: Margot Kahn and Hilary Behrman
Help us welcome two writers from our 2024 Willa Cather Residency for Writers cohort as they share recent publications! Margot Kahn and Hillary Behrman will read excerpts from their books as they reflect on their unique writers-in-residence experiences. This event is free with registration.
A meditation on the transformations that come with building relationships and raising children, Margot Kahn’s The Unreliable Tree explores caregiving, identity, and sacrifice in tandem with the changing seasons of her family’s orchard.
Lake Effect is Hillary Behrman’s first collection of short stories. Whether they are part of a big city’s bustle or tucked away in a wild place, Behrman’s characters wrestle with sustaining connections in a frenetic and increasingly inhospitable world.
The views expressed in this program are not necessarily the views of the Willa Cather Foundation.
The National Willa Cather Center is ADA accessible. We offer physical, visual, and audio accommodations for all attendees. If you require handicapped accessible seating, an ASL interpreter, or any other accommodations, please contact our Visitor Services Coordinator, Nick Powers, at npowers@willacather.org. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
Margot Kahn
Margot Kahn is the author of The Unreliable Tree (Northwestern University Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Society of America, American Poets, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is also the author of a biography, Horses That Buck (2008), which won the High Plains Book Award, and co-editor of two anthologies: This Is the Place (2017) and Wanting (2023). Her work has been recognized with awards from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture, the Jack Straw Writers Program, Washington State’s Artist Trust, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Willa Cather Foundation, among others. Originally from Ohio, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
Hillary Berhman
Hillary Behrman’s award winning short stories have been described as deeply humane and unsettling and have been published in journals, magazines, short story dispensers and an anthology. Lake Effect, her debut collection of stories, was chosen by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande Books in 2026. Groff praised Lake Effect as a book of “great moral power and heart” by “an author of extraordinary grace." Hillary is a recipient of the Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and her fiction has been a finalist for several other literary prizes. She holds an MFA in fiction from Pacific University and has received support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, the Willa Cather Foundation, Vashon Artist Residency, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Hillary lives and writes in Seattle where she raised two kids and worked as a children’s civil rights lawyer and public defender. Hillary is currently working on her first novel.