Bill Hatcher

Bill Hatcher is the author of The Marble Room: How I Lost God and Found Myself in Africa (2012), and Principles of Flight: Flying Bush Planes Through a World of War, Sexism, and Meat (2018).

Principles of Flight was judged a finalist in the 2018-19 National Indie Excellence Awards in Social and Political Change. In 2011, Colorado’s Creede Arts Council featured an excerpt from The Marble Room in the Willow Creek Journal. (Please see the corresponding page for each title on this website.)

Bill grew up in the rural Midwest in a family of conservative Christians. Life was safe and predictable―until his parents divorced when he was in his teens. Attempting to rewrite the ending of his parents’ marriage and salvage his worldview, he married a young evangelical woman, but that, too, ended in divorce.

Desperate for answers, he left home to serve in the Peace Corps. He was assigned to teach at an all-girls' boarding school in Tanzania. Over the next two years, his Bible Belt racism and religious beliefs crumbled as the challenges he faced escalated; glimpsing death on holy peaks, meeting “ancestor spirits” in sacred caves, and receiving the leopard-spirit’s blessing from elder shamans.

After Peace Corps, Hatcher led wilderness courses for the National Outdoor Leadership School in Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, and several western states. As recounted in his second book, Principles of Flight, he also flew bush planes in Kenya, Alaska, and the western U.S.

In addition to writing, Bill teaches geography and anthropology in southern Colorado, where he lives with his wife, Kim, and their cat, Mitts.