SM Hulse Books in Order

S. M. Hulse was born in California and grew up in Spokane, Washington, where books were a regular part of home life. She has said she was an eager reader from childhood, and she began making up stories early, with her mother writing down some of the tales she told.

Writing stuck. At school, Hulse took part in a young-authors program and wrote a new story each year. She even finished a novel in high school, though she has said it won't be published.

Her path to fiction wasn't perfectly straight. Hulse spent a semester at Georgetown University with an interest in foreign service, then transferred to the University of Montana, where she earned an English degree. She taught high school in Moscow, Idaho, before pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Oregon.

That MFA gave her the space to write a novel.

Her first published novel, Black River, follows Wes Carver, a former corrections officer returning to his small Montana hometown after his wife's death. He is carrying her ashes, as well as a parole-board notice for the prisoner who held him hostage during a violent prison riot years earlier. The book brings together grief, faith, music, family strain, and the hard question of whether forgiveness is possible. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and won the Reading the West Book Award.

Readers who enjoy rural settings with real moral pressure will find a lot to hold onto in Black River. Wes is a fiddler whose trauma has left him unable to play, and that loss gives the story a quiet, personal center amid its tension.

Hulse returned to Montana for Eden Mine, a novel about the aftermath of a courthouse bombing in a small community. Jo Faber learns that her missing brother, Samuel, may be responsible, while a pastor faces the possible loss of his young daughter, who was injured in the blast. The novel follows people caught between loyalty, fear, faith, and the consequences of violence. It received the Christianity Today Book Award for fiction.

The West is central to these books.

Hulse writes about places where the land, local history, and politics shape everyday choices. Her characters are often decent people in painful conflict with one another, trying to live with old wounds and difficult responsibilities. Her stories have also appeared in Willow Springs, Witness, and Salamander.

She was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has taught creative writing at several universities. An avid horsewoman and a fiddler, Hulse has lived in Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon, experiences that help explain the close attention her fiction gives to the contemporary American West.