Rolaine Hochstein (1929-2023) published features and profiles for the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Ms. Magazine, and Good Housekeeping before turning her hand to fiction, with two novels: Stepping Out (Norton, 1977) and Table 47 (Doubleday, 1983). She is perhaps best known for her short stories, of which she published more than 40, and which have been translated into French, Hungarian, Chinese, and Japanese. They have also been anthologized in two O. Henry Prize anthologies and a Pushcart Prize anthology, and four have appeared in La Revista magazine in Colombia. She was awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She worked with Writers in the Schools (WITS) with the New Jersey Writers Project. Among her proudest accomplishments was having been the oldest mentor with the writing program Girls Write Now.
During her last MacDowell residency in 1994, she met and, for the next three decades, remained friends with visual artist Kathy Grove and playwright and fiction writer Han Ong. Han Ong writes: “Credit Rollie’s gift of friendship with the durability of our relationship. She was one of my role models, for her intelligence, her curiosity, and for her great appetite for life and art, all of which remained with her to the end. She and her wide-ranging conversations will be greatly missed by both Kathy and myself."
