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Hanna grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma as a passionate reader with a passionate dog obsession, and throughout elementary school, refused any book that wasn’t about dogs in some capacity. Since then she has somewhat expanded her literary palate, but her favorite stories still tend to have an animal in them somewhere.
In college Hanna studied English and Creative Writing, steadfastly pursuing her dream of becoming a novelist. But after graduating, she discovered that her dream would take some stubborn pursuit, and so over the next ten years she worked as a Barnes & Noble Bookseller, a Scholastic Book Fairs Merchandiser, a community college writing tutor, a plant saleswoman, and an Etsy mug painter, alongside her writing. In 2020, she saw her dream come to fruition at last with the publication of her debut YA fantasy, Ignite the Sun, which was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, and won the Oklahoma Creative Women prize for juvenile fiction in 2021. Three years later, her sophomore novel followed (Our Divine Mischief), which also won the Oklahoma Creative Women prize, as well as the Tome Society Award. In the Spring of 2027, she anticipates the release of her debut adult fantasy, Fallow Lies the Blood, and she feels incredibly blessed and honored to be able to do the thing she loves most to do: spin stories onto the page.
Hanna has, rather accidentally, begun to collect “H” surnames. Initially publishing under her maiden name, Howard, she married into yet another “H” name, and then subsequently needed a pseudonym when her publisher requested one for her debut adult fantasy. After spending some time with variations on her first surname, she selected a rather literal translation of the Old English designation of the name Hayward, which one of her aspirational ancestors changed to a more aristocratic Howard: hæg weard, meaning “guardian of the hedge.”
Hopeful of evoking hedgerows and cottages, country lanes, farmers, and hedgehogs, Hanna fell upon Hedgeward with enthusiasm. Under this name, her adult fantasy aspires to do what her ancestors apparently felt to be beneath them, and guard the hedge. Of course, the metaphorical hedge requires a different kind of guarding. To Hanna, this seems an almost holy duty of care: a pursuit of wonder and small beauty; a constant reflecting of the natural world, of creatures and plants and embodied experience; an honoring of the humble, the pastoral, the communal; a marriage of both the extraordinary and the simple, acknowledging that often the most apparently insignificant things are the most important of all.
Hanna is married to her One True Love, and they have three small hobbit children: a kind-hearted, word-loving son, and twin daughters: one like a flame, the other like a beam of sunlight. At present they have one rescue dog–a very athletic shepherd/lab mix–but Our Divine Mischief was inspired by Hanna’s canine best friend of 12 years, a devious Catahoula Leopard Dog named Ophelia, who died in early 2020 and left a very large hole in her family’s hearts. Whenever possible, Hanna spends time in her garden or at her desk, coaxing beauty from the earth or stories from the page. There is nothing she likes quite so well as a properly-brewed cup of strong British tea.