J. C. Hallman

Hallman was interviewed about his work in uncovering the details of Anarcha's life and death by filmmaker Josh Carples in the documentary Remembering Anarcha, which was an official selection of the San Francisco Black Film Festival in 2020. Hallman linked Sims’ experimentations on young black women to the ongoing health crisis in Africa regarding the treatment of obstetric fistula, a condition that results from complications during childbirth, in a piece about Alica Emasu, founder of the Terrewode Women's Community Hospital, for The Baffler. Up until recently, Sims has been regularly lauded as the father of gynecology and had worked to cure fistulas, though Hallman uncovered his radical experimentations on enslaved men and women to read “like snippets lifted from the pages of a horror story,” questioning Sims's altruism due to his feelings of disgust at diseases of the female pelvic region. Rather, Hallman notes, Sims was motivated by a chance at immortalizing himself in the annals of medical history.

In 2017, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a commission to evaluate controversial monuments in the city, including the statue of controversial surgeon J. Marion Sims, in Central Park. During the 90 day evaluation period, Hallman's essay about the Sims monument, "Monumental Error," appeared on the cover of Harper's Magazine, and was published during the time the Public Design Commission held public forums for the evaluation of these monuments. The piece contributed to the greater, nationwide debate about the role of Confederate monuments. The article was distributed to the entire commission. The Sims statue was voted out by unanimous decision and removed in April 2018.

Hallman's book B & Me was called “a fascinating thing to behold: literary criticism that’s deeply personal, hysterically funny, and starkly honest” by Jeff Turrentine at The Washington Post and in the San Francisco Chronicle, Joseph Peschel claimed he “fell in love” with Hallman's book. Hallman told Interview Magazine that “we can be brazen, outrageous, or explicit in books when in our regular lives we are not. That’s exactly what books should do” and in 2015, Hallman was invited to discuss B & Me on C-Span's BookTV. B & Me was also translated into Chinese and He Zhihe at Line Today reviewed the book, stating “Hallman's intention break[s] the genre with creativity; … [it] deliberately breaks the boundaries of genres.”

In 2010, Hallman spoke with famed literary critic Parul Sehgal for Publishers Weekly about his nonfiction travelogue which explores modern-day utopians, which was described as “funnier, wiser, sadder, and, surprisingly, more hopeful than Thomas More’s misunderstood classic,” by writer Jeff Sharlet. The Utne Reader states that in the conclusion of the book, Hallman says that is “the very idea of utopia that is importance even when it doesn't work in practice.” Hallman told “The Book Show” of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that “utopian literature...puts something onto the map of the imagination, makes something seem possible imaginatively, before anybody steps in and tries to take the next step out of actually proposing something.”

Hallman received a McKnight Artist Fellowship in fiction in 2010, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in the general non-fiction category in 2013. Hallman also won a Pushcart Prize in 2009 for this short story, “Ethan: A Love Story,” first published in Tin House Magazine. His essay, “A House is a Machine to Live In,” was featured in the 2010 Best American Travel Writing, edited by Bill Buford, which features the residential cruise ship, MS The World.

Hallman's first short story collection, The Hospital for Bad Poets, was released in 2009 by Milkweed Editions. In The New York Times, Hallman was described as one who “reconfigures our everyday errors and flaws into deeply affecting fiction...[he] is wonderfully bright.” In an interview with Ron Hogan of beatrice.com, Hallman said, “The only thing I set out to do was create, or recreate, something which had pleased me.” In The LA Times, author and critic Steve Almond stated that “like Kafka before him, [Hallman is] on the make for the sturdy truths in an era of spiritual dislocation.”

To research The Chess Artist, which details the story of his friendship with Glenn Umstead, Hallman visited Elista, Kalmykia to interview Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, first president of Kalmykia and president of FIDE from 1995 to 2018, about chess. The book was described in The Boston Globe as “vivid journeys through the territories of friendship, passion for a game, and chess history and described in The Arizona Republic as "a chess book like no other, irreverent, insightful, and funny."

Hallman grew up in Southern California and studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Johns Hopkins University. In the mid-1990s, Hallman worked as a table games dealer in Atlantic City for five years, during a period when the city was experiencing an increase in suicides, including a close friend of Hallman's. This incident is detailed in his 2015 Harper’s essay "Getting to the End."

J.C. Hallman (born 1967) is an American author, essayist, and researcher. His work has been widely published in Harper's, GQ, The Baffler, Tin House Magazine, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He is the author of six books, and his nonfiction combines memoir, history, journalism, and travelogue, including the highly acclaimed B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, a book about love, literature, and modern life.