Esther Hayes is a fiction writer from Nevada. Her work has appeared in Electric Lit, The Threepenny Review, Guernica Magazine, and Puerto del Sol. She received her MFA from Colorado State University where she was an associate editor at Colorado Review.

She was the winner of the 2024 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, selected by Carmen Maria Machado and performed for Selected Shorts by Colby Minifie.

She served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fiction Fellow at Colgate University and has been granted fellowships from Monson Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Community of Writers, and the Ucross Foundation. She currently lives in Northern Colorado and is working on a collection of short stories and a novel.