Her first novel, Disturbance of the Inner Ear, won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. Narrated by a cellist who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, the book explores how 2nd generation trauma is transmitted, and can be healed. Hackett's current project, Reconstruction, is a novel-in-progress about Frederick Douglass and his German-Jewish mistress, Ottilie Assing. Set amidst the contest over the 14th and 15th Amendments, it is about the reconstructions of self that Douglass and others engage in, in order to sculpt their historical legacies.

A writer and activist, Hackett's awards includ the Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize at the American Academy Berlin. She was the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at The George Washington University, where she created a city-wide community service project, Washington Write-a-Story Day, which engaged hundreds of DC residents in free, place-based writing workshops; its goal was to map the city via narrative.

more about joyce hackett