Background
Alan Hines was born on March 19, 1951, in Dallas, Texas, United States. He is the son of Marshall A. and Lois M. (McCaslin) Hines.
Alan Hines
160 Convent Ave, New York, NY 10031, United States
City College of New York where Alan Hines received his Bachelor of Arts degree.
2900 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11210, United States
Brooklyn College where Alan Hines received his Master of Fine Arts degree.
160 Convent Ave, New York, NY 10031, United States
City College of New York where Alan Hines received his Bachelor of Arts degree.
2900 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11210, United States
Brooklyn College where Alan Hines received his Master of Fine Arts degree.
Peabody Award which Alan Hines received in 2003.
(Set on the Blackland Prairie of Texas in the early 1950s,...)
Set on the Blackland Prairie of Texas in the early 1950s, Square Dance is the story of Homer Dillard, a cantankerous old man, and his eleven-year-old precocious and Bible-toting granddaughter, Gemma. They live together on a tumbledown chicken farm and sell eggs door to door in the nearby small town of Twilight. Dillard is eighty years old, left by his wife and by his daughter, Gemma's mother. Both have been abandoned, and their grudging loyalty to each other is at once fierce and touching. Incensed by Dillard's cussedness, Gemma finally packs up out of moral indignation and strikes off for the supposed glamour of Fort Worth, where her estranged mother lives a life of tawdry failure as a hairdresser. So begins Gemma's remarkable journey, and in telling it, Alan Hines has created a rich, touching, and funny novel about the pains of growing up and growing old.
https://www.amazon.com/Square-Dance-Alan-Hines/dp/0060152974
1984
editor educator screenwriter author
Alan Hines was born on March 19, 1951, in Dallas, Texas, United States. He is the son of Marshall A. and Lois M. (McCaslin) Hines.
When Alan Hines was eighteen, he moved to New York City for all the usual reasons, including the idea that he wanted to be an actor. Uta Hagen, who had a long, illustrious career on the stage and was one of the most important acting teachers in the country, accepted him into her acting class. Right away the process of creating characters was exciting to him. He learned more about writing in that class than he probably did about acting, and soon that's where he put his focus. Then he began his studies at City College of New York where he studied fiction writing with Ted Solotaroff and Susan Sontag, among others. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977. Then he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at Brooklyn College in 1980.
Alan Hines, after finishing his studies, worked as a waiter at a restaurant for ten years, writing articles for the Soho Weekly News and the New York Native, as well as many short stories, most of them unpublished. When Alan Hines wrote his novel, Ted Solotaroff brought it to an editor at Harper & Row. Square Dance was published in 1984. Square Dance is about a 13-year-old girl named Gemma, who was raised by her bitter, contentious old grandfather. Gemma was abandoned by her mother and told that her father died in Vietnam. Square Dance is only autobiographical in terms of sensibility. Certain events and stories were passed down through Hines' family. This book was adapted for film by Alan Hines and released by Island Films in 1987.
Hines wrote several other screenplays, including A Stranger in the Kingdom and O'Keefe and Stieglitz. He wrote screenplays for television movies, including In Sickness and In Health, Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story, and Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story. His short fiction appeared in New World Writing, storySouth, the Literateur, and elsewhere.
Besides his main activity, Hines taught writing workshops and a few screenwriting courses at Drexel University from 1999 till 2004 finally becoming a full-time professor at Kutztown University in 2009. He left teaching in 2016.
Alan Hines had an extensive career as an editor and author of educational publications. For his activity, he was listed as a notable literature educator and writer by Marquis Who's Who. Hines was recognized with numerous awards for his fiction, including the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, Mishima Yukio Prize, 2003 Peabody Award, and Educational Press Award.
(Set on the Blackland Prairie of Texas in the early 1950s,...)
1984Alan Hines was influenced by William Maxwell, Robert Altman, Horton Foote, Andy Goldsworthy, Lanford Wilson, Katherine Anne Porter, Ian McEwan, Howard Hodgkin, William Trevor, Preston Sturges, Penelope Lively, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Terrence Malik, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flannery O'Connor.
Also, his work is strongly influenced by family tales, Texas, and folklore. Details from small-town life and the people who make up those vanishing communities are his special considerations. To preserve some sense of tradition, both in family and in community, is important to him.
Alan Hines is a member of the Authors Guild.
