Briallen Hopper is an American author, writer, columnist, and literary critic. She is the author of the Bloomsbury collection Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (2019). Her work has been published in Vox, The Yale Review, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and other publications.^[1][2][3] Hopper's Curbed column, "House Rules," covered topics such as mental health, culture, and community during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[4]

Hopper is an associate professor in the English department and co-director of the MFA Program at Queens College, CUNY, where she teaches non-fiction, public writing, protest prose, and editorial practices. She is the U.S. representative and contributing editor on And Other Stories^[5] and serves as editor-in-chief of online religion and culture literary magazine, Killing The Buddha.^[6][7] Hopper's essay, "Young Adult Cancer Story,"^[8] remains the most-viewed piece in the history of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

She teaches Writing About Family at Yale University.^[9]

Early life

Briallen Hopper grew up as one of six siblings^[10] in an evangelical Christian household.^[11] As a teenager she loved 19th-century novels by women, including authors like Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell: "They all write so intensely about young women becoming adults and I took it all to heart."^[12]

Hopper began her higher education at Tacoma Community College, where she also began teaching, tutoring English and ESL as a work-study job.^[12] She transferred to the University of Puget Sound, graduating summa cum laude in English and History.^[13] She earned a PhD from Princeton in 2008.^[14] Following her PhD, Hopper became a full-time lecturer and University Church Faculty Fellow at Yale University.^[15]

Career

While earning her PhD, Hopper taught in the Princeton English Department as a Quin Morton Teaching Fellow, where she won an APGA Teaching Award with the Princeton Writing Program for her classes on "American Short Fiction" and "African American Satire."^[16] Princeton Writing Program Director Kerry Walk said of Hopper, “Briallen is a teacher whose greatest gift is to inspire students to take their thinking and writing to the next level -- and then to the level beyond that one.”^[16]

Following her PhD, Hopper enrolled at Yale Divinity School^[14] where the 2008 academic hiring freeze made securing full-time academic posts newly difficult.^[17] The experience of writing sermons as a preacher^[18] encouraged her to experiment with writing for a broad audience ("written for actual people, not for someone on JSTOR in seven years,”) and Hopper began writing popular essays,^[14] published in the Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books.^[17] In 2011, she left divinity school but remained a preacher^[19] and professor with the Yale English Department, teaching creative writing while serving on Yale's Advisory Committee for Diversity and Faculty Development.^[15] Hopper was subsequently hired by the English Department at Queens College, CUNY, where she is an associate professor of writing and co-director of the MFA Program.^[20][21] She has been teaching creative writing with the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) since 2020.^[22]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hopper's Curbed advice column "House Rules" was acquired by New York Magazine, covering topics such as mental health, remote work, and home culture during lockdown.^[4][23] In 2022, Hopper's essay "Sex and the Single Frump" was published in Harper Perennial feminist anthology, Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic (2022). ^[24][25][26] Later that year, her essay "Everybody’s Protest Essay: Personal Protest Prose on the American Internet" was published in The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022) as part of Edinburgh University Press' series, Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities.^[27][28][29]

Bibliography

References