Hester Kaplan is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage (University of Georgia Press, and Norton), which received The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction; and Unravished (Ig Publishing); the novels The Tell (HarperCollins) and Kinship Theory (Little, Brown). Her stories and essays have appeared in Agni Review, Ploughshares, Story, Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals and publications.  Her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories, Creature Needs, Providence Noir, Beautiful Flesh, and others.  

Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two fellowships in literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, she was named Mark Twain Fellow for her new book, Twice Born (Catapult, 2025).  Her work has received the McGinnis Ritchie Award for Non-fiction, The Salamander Award for Fiction, among other awards and recognitions.

She is a co-founder of Write Rhode Island!, a state-wide high school writing competition, and Goat Hill, a literary production group hosting events such as conversations and panels with authors, agents, and editors, as well as offering workshops, seminars, and novel and memoir development courses.  

She works one-on-one with writers of fiction and non-fiction at all levels of experience as coach, mentor, and developmental editor, and designs programs for those looking for a graduate-level course of extended study.  She runs writing retreats, most recently in Mexico, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well as on-line writing workshops.  She has taught creative writing at Rhode Island School of Design, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, the Newport MFA Program, and is on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.