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Marilyn Moriarty, Hollins University professor of English and creative writing, has earned the 2025 Hammond House International Literary Prize for Scriptwriting for her screenplay Riders on the Storm.

Each year, the competition centers on a theme for entrants submitting 10pages of a script; the 2025 theme, “secrets,” aligned closely with Moriarty’s screenplay, Riders on the Storm, adapted from of her award-winning memoir, Moses Unchained.

Published in 1998 and reissued in paperback in 2012 by the University of Georgia Press, Moses Unchained won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award in Creative Nonfiction. The memoir recounts “the days in the early 1990s before the AIDS drug cocktail,” explains Moriarity. “I befriended a man who believed his wife had deliberately infected him with HIV, and he asked me to write his story.”

Moriarty has taught Shakespeare, Holocaust literature, literary theory, and creative nonfiction. She was Hollins’ inaugural Berry Professor of Liberal Studies and received the Herta Freitag Award for Critical and Creative Achievement. She retires in June 2026 and plans to continue writing screenplays and books.

Her interest in scriptwriting dates back decades. In 1975, she was one of three winners of the Edinburgh University Student Playwriting Contest. While earning her master’s at the University of Florida, she wrote an original closing play for an introduction to drama class. Years of teaching Shakespeare have sharpened her ear for dialogue and dramatic structure.

Moriarty gleans inspiration from a range of disciplines. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), she collaborated with an evolutionary biologist to teach science writing in a summer bridge program; she later directed the summer science writing component over four years, leading to the creation of a textbook, Writing Science through Critical Thinking, Her association with UCI scientists  introduced her to the then-current thought about AIDS.

“I like a lot of literary theory, which gives me a framework to approach different kinds of writing,” she says. “Once you know how to write, you can write anything–the divisions between genres are largely artificial, based on conventions.”

She is also completing a new book on secrets, Splintered Shadows: Recovering a French Résistante, forthcoming this fall from University of North Georgia Press. The project explores a family history she uncovered later in life: “My mother was in the French Underground and served a four-year hard labor sentence in German prisons and factories,” Moriarty explains. “She died when I was 14, and there was a lot I didn’t know about her.”

A 1945 love letter from her mother, Andrée, to Moriarty’s father—signed with the name “Liliane” – prompted decades of questions. Only in 2012 , during a trip to France, did Moriarty learn that “Liliane” was her mother’s wartime alias, a discovery that opened new avenues of archival research. She plans to adapt the book into a screenplay.

Moriarty’s essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Creative Nonfiction, Dappled Things, The Kenyon Review, Raritan, Relief, River Teeth, and other journals. Her honors include the AWP Award, the Pirates Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for the Essay, Best Spiritual Writing 2024 for “Bone Lab,” the Peregrine Prize for Fiction, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the University of Utah Novella Prize.

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