About the Author
Christine Hale's newest book, Willingness: A Writer's Meditations on Crossing the Flood (WTAW Press, 2025), is a collaboration with her late husband, Kevin "Mc" McIlvoy.
Christine Hale is the author of A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations (Apprentice House Press, 2016)—which the Los Angeles Review of Books called "a portrait of a consciousness...[that] will bruise you...leave you permanently marked"—and a novel, Basil's Dream (Livingston Press, 2009), which received honorable mention in the 2010 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. National Book Award finalist Joan Silber says "Basil's Dream…seems to prove fiction can go where other forms can't." Ms. Hale's short fiction and creative nonfiction pieces have appeared in numerous journals, including Arts & Letters, The Sun, The Cincinnati Review, and Southern Humanities Review. She has been a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A fellow of MacDowell, Ucross, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ms. Hale earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She also holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has worked in investment banking and in business communications as freelance writer and editor. From 2011- 2020, she taught in the Antioch University-Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville, NC. She served as a fiction editor of Orison Books from 2017-2020. She was married to Kevin McIlvoy from 2008 until his death in 2022. In addition to her work completing Willingness, she has shepherded into publication two other posthumous books for her late husband: Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels (WTAW Press, 2023) and a collection of poems, Singing Lessons (Press 53, 2024). At present, she is writing essays on a Buddhist path through widowhood, including the Pushcart-nominated "His Body" (The Cincinnati Review); "Wobble" (Still), nominated for Best of the Net; and "Inside Outside In-Between" (Southern Humanities Review), anthologized in Best Spiritual Literature 2025.