Mars Hill

Bio

Mars Hill was born in Arkansas, and grew up in a church that his grandfather founded. At 16, he moved to Chicago, Illinois. He earned a B.S. degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Illinois, an M.A. in African, and African-American Studies and a D.A. in Humanistic Studies from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. He has written and produced a number of plays, mostly for his own company, The Black Experience Ensemble Inc., founded in 1969. Hill taught a writing course in fiction at Marist College in Glenmount, New York and at SUNY at Albany. He taught a graduate course on Black American Writers, fall of 1998 at SUNY Albany. In 1987, he took a course in William Kennedy’s Writers Work Shop at Skidmore College, under the direction of Russell Banks, where Hill began writing his novel, The Moaner’s’ Bench.. In September of 1998, Harper Collins published Book I. It has been nominated for the Pulitzer. He is the recipient of a fellowship for the 1979 New York State Council on the Arts Creative Service Award (CAPS) for playwrights, and the 1989 fellowship for fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His fiction, (Faith of a Fisherman; Capital Magazine; July 1990) plays and poems have been published in local, regional and national magazines. He recently was awarded first prize for the Paul Laurence Dunbar poetry prize by the Detroit Writers Guild.