Lynne Hugo is an American author whose roots are in New England. A National Endowment For The Arts Fellowship recipient, she has also received repeat individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her publications include ten novels, as well as a memoir, WHERE THE TRAIL GROWS FAINT, which won the Riverteeth Creative Nonfiction Book Prize. An eleventh novel, THE LANGUAGE OF KIN, was published in ’23, and MOTHERS OF FATE in ’25. She has also published two books of poetry and a children’s book. She lives with her husband, a photographer, in the Midwest. The couple are parents of two, have four grandchildren, and an energetic beagle/Lab cross who excels at barking, retrieving tennis balls, and terrorizing squirrels, and they revel in their rowdy extended family.

Forthcoming literary fiction novels include her thirteenth novel, UNDER AN INDIANA SKY, which will publish in the fall of 2026.

Ms. Hugo has taught creative writing to hundreds of schoolchildren through the Ohio Arts Council’s renowned Arts in Education program. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College, and a Master’s from Miami University.

When an editor asked her to describe herself as a writer, she responded:

“I write in black Wal-Mart capri sweatpants. They don’t start out as capris, but I routinely shrink them in the drier by accident. And I always buy black because it doesn’t show where I’ve wiped the chocolate off my hands. Now that no children live here, my previous high grade of ‘below average’ in Domestic Achievement has dropped somewhat. But I’m less guilty about it now. I lose myself in crafting language by a window with birdfeeders hanging in the branches of a Chinese elm that towers over the house. When I come up for air, I hike by the ponds and along the river in a nearby forest with my dog–and my husband, with whom I planted that elm tree as a bare root sapling.”