Richard Hawley was born in 1945 in Chicago. He attended suburban
public schools in Arlington Heights, Illinois, before attending
Middlebury College, where he completed his B.A. in political science.
He went on to graduate studies at Case Western Reserve University,
where he earned an M.S. in Management Science and a Ph.D. in political
philosophy. He also studied theology for a year at St. John’s College,
Cambridge University, as an M.A. research student under the tutelage
of the theologian W. Norman Pittenger.

In the fall of 1968 he began teaching at Cleveland’s University
School, an independent college preparatory school for boys. He would
go on to teach history, economics, philosophy and English literature,
while also serving the school as history department chairman, dean of
students, director of the Upper School, and, from 1988 until his
retirement in 2005, Headmaster. In 1995 he was named the founding
president of the International Boys Schools Coalition.

A writer of fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction, he has
published more than twenty books and several monographs. His essays,
articles and poems have appeared in dozens of literary, scholarly, and
commercial journals, including The New York Times, The Atlantic
Monthly, American Film, Commonweal, America, Orion, and The Christian
Science Monitor and is represented in many literary anthologies For
ten years he taught fiction and non-fiction writing at The Breadloaf
Writers Conference in Vermont, and he continues to teach developing
writers in a variety of settings. Recent work, including work in
progress, draws increasingly from depth psychology and classical
philosophy to illuminate contemporary problems.

He has lectured extensively at universities, schools, and conferences
in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. He is
married to Mary Hawley, a painter and fabric artist. They live in
Ripton, Vermont.