Hughes, Mary Gray

Mary Gray Hughes, the daughter of Texas author and newspaperman, Hart Stilwell and his first wife, Mary Gray Seabury, was born in Brownsville, Texas on August 25, 1930. A prolific and respected author in her own right, Hughes wrote and was published almost continuously for nearly three decades from 1969 until dying from cancer in Chicago, IL in September, 1999. Throughout her life, she received numerous awards for her writing. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing (1978), was Illinois Writer in Residence from 1977-80, had her stories anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1962, 1972), had her stories mentioned in Best American Stories (1974-5), and was elected a member of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1983.

Hughes graduated from Brownsville High School in 1947 then attended The University of Mexico for a summer before completing her education at The University of Texas and Barnard College. While at Barnard, she participated in Phi Beta Kappa and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship for two years, she pursued a Master of Letters in Social Anthropology. She graduated in 1953.

In this same year, she married J.R.T. Hughes. Moving to Illinois, Hughes gave birth to a son, Benjamin in 1960, and twin girls, Charis and Margaret, in 1962. Starting in 1954, Hughes worked continuously at a variety of jobs – almost all in the teaching, publishing, and writing fields. She was an editor at Bowker Publishing Co. and People’s Book Club, and was the Writer-in Residence of the Illinois Arts Council. She conducted writing workshops at high schools and colleges; served as consultant for the Illinois Arts Council; was writer-consultant to the graduate program in Creative Writing for the University of South Alabama; lecturer in English at Lake Forest College; lecturer in English at Northwestern University, and a judge for the Texas Institute of Letters.

All the while, Hughes worked on her own writing and had numerous short stories, poems, and books published. Notable among her works are the short story collections, The Calling and Cora’s Seduction and other Stories, and the novel, The Empty Lot . This collection of papers represent the materials published by Puckerbrush Press as Cora’s Seduction and Other Stories, and were donated to Texas State University’s Southwestern Writers Collection by the Press in 2003. The SWWC has an additional collection of Hughes’ papers donated by her children.