Hayley Swinson is from Columbia, SC. She graduated in 2010 from the University of Richmond, VA with a degree in French and Creative Writing and decided to chase adventure to Montreal, Canada. After her visa expired, her interest and experience in costuming for theater and film led her to join the film union, IATSE Local 491. For two years, she worked on films and shows small and large, including WE’RE THE MILLERS, EASTBOUND AND DOWN, and UNDER THE DOME, but by the end of 2013, she decided to pursue her primary passion in earnest: writing and editing.
Hayley spent a year and a half pursuing an MSc in Prose Writing at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and while she was there, she dove deeply into the travel blogging industry, making connections far and wide through the TBEX Athens conference and online travel communities.
From 2014-2016 she ran a blog/online magazine called Savvy Girl Travel. At its peak, the site was receiving close to ten thousand views per month. The domain name now belongs to someone else, but all her interviews, collaborations, and personal posts can be found throughout this site.
In 2017, she was accepted into a low-residency MFA program for fiction writing at Queens University of Charlotte, and she graduated in May of 2019. That same month, she enrolled in UNC-Wilmington’s MA in English program and graduated two years later with a concentration in Science and Medical Writing. Her master’s thesis was titled, “The Ecological Light of Literature: Redefining Place Through Trans-Corporeality and Sympoiesis.”
From 2019-2021, Hayley worked for SFK Press out of Georgia as an editor. She also served as Editor-in-Chief of the press’s sister magazine, The New Southern Fugitives. She previously taught in the English and Creative Writing departments at UNCW and currently works in communications in Raleigh, NC while pursuing her own fiction and nonfiction projects.
Her work has been published in various outlets online and in print, including Atlas + Alice, Cutbank Online, VALVE Journal, The Messenger, Focus on the Coast, Cape Fear Living Magazine, The New Southern Fugitives, and Edinburgh City of Literature’s Story Shop.
To read more of her work, click here.
To find out how Hayley can help you with your latest project, check out her services here.