Waterston Desert Writing Prize
Hannah Hindley – 2020 Prize Winner
Hannah Hindley’s winning submission, “Thin Blue Dream,” proposes a collection of interconnected stories that explore the Sonoran Desert’s disappearing waterways, the fish that used to call them home, and the successes and complications that come with efforts to help restore depleted tributaries with city effluent. “It’s a strange story of ghost rivers, dead fish, and resilience in the heart of urban spaces in the desert,” states Hindley.
Currently completing her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona, Hindley is also a wilderness guide, licensed captain, environmental curriculum designer and naturalist. Her work as a naturalist has taken her to remote wildernesses, from the arid islands in the Sea of Cortez and the fog desert of Baja California, to national parks all over the west. She has written for publications including the Harvard Review, Hakai Magazine, Terrain, River Teeth and Alaska Magazine. Hindley has been the writer in residence at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism, the New Conrads Prize, the Bill Waller Award for Nonfiction, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship for the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop. Hindley graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.