Emily Hilliard

Folklorist, Writer, Media Producer

Emily Hilliard is a folklorist, writer, and media producer based at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Hilliard worked previously as the Program Director for Folk and Traditional Arts at Mid Atlantic Arts and from 2015-2021, she served as the West Virginia State Folklorist and Founding Director of the West Virginia Folklife Program at the West Virginia Humanities Council. She holds an M.A. in folklore from the University of North Carolina, and a B.A. in English and French from the University of Michigan. Her book, Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in November 2022, and was named a finalist for the 2022 nonfiction Weatherford Award for books “best illuminating the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.”

For over the past decade, Hilliard has worked with cultural heritage and traditional arts institutions including Mid Atlantic Arts, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, the North Carolina Folklore Society, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, and Maryland Traditions. She was a 2020-2021 American Folklife Center Archie Green Fellow for a project documenting the occupational folklife of rural mail carriers in Central Appalachia. In 2018, she was a recipient of the AFC’s Gerald E. and Corrine L. Parsons Fund Award and in 2016, received their Henry Reed Fund Award. She currently serves as the Film and Video Reviews Editor for the Journal of American Folklore, and as a board member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.

Hilliard is a co-editor of 55 Strong: Inside The West Virginia Teachers' Strike from BELT Publishing, and wrote the foreword to the most recent edition of Patrick Gainer's Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills from West Virginia University Press. Her chapter, “The Reason We Make These Deep Fat-Fried Treats: In Conversation with the Rosettes of Helvetia, West Virginia,” is included in the 2019 collection, The Food We Eat, The Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables, from Ohio University Press.

Her writing and media work have been published elsewhere by NPR, Oxford American, Southern Cultures, Lucky Peach, Ecotone Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, The Southern Foodways Alliance's James Beard award-winning quarterly Gravy, and the James Beard award-nominated Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, among others. From 2005-2016, Hilliard wrote and published the pie blog Nothing in the House, a finalist in The Kitchn's 2014 Best Baking & Sweets Homie Awards.

Hilliard has been a faculty member of the University of Michigan's New England Literature Program, and currently teaches in Marshall University's Graduate Humanities Program.

Her research and writing interests include foodways, vernacular music, occupational folklife, radical feminism and domestic space, and the intersections between traditional, experimental, and radical culture. 

She is also a musician and a co-founder of the feminist record label SPINSTER.

Get in touch | emilyhilliard@gmail.com