Ms. Hampl writes essays, travel pieces and book reviews in a wide range of publications.

Guest editor, Ploughshares,  Spring 2012

 “F. Scott Fitzgerald’;s Essays From The Edge,”The American Scholar, March 2012

“The Dark Heart Of Description,” which was originally published in the Iowa Review, was included in the Best American Essays 2009

“The Lax Habits of the Free Imagination”: An essay on encountering the study questions for one’s own anthologized writing

“The Whole Anne Frank”: Review of the Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank

“Trying to Get God’s Attention”: Review of A Silence Opens: Poems by Amy Clampitt; The Great Fire: Poems 1982-1992 by Jack Gilbert;  Earthly Measures: Poems by Edward Hirsch

“Whistling In the Dark”: Review of The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks

“Comeback for Capek”: Review of Karel Capek: Life and Work by Ivan Kilma and Cross Roads by Karel Capek

“First body memory – rainwater sluicing down my tadpole self with fabulous force from a drainpipe at the side of my grandmother’s house in St. Paul, theatrical thunderclaps and lightning jags above me. ‘Stop that screeching this minute!’ my mother called from the kitchen. ‘You sound like you’re being murdered out there.’ But you can’t silence delight – I kept screaming and the gorgeous cold water kept gushing.

Only my grandmother could get me pried away from that pint-sized waterfall. She had serious business to conduct out there. I was diverting precious water from the wooden beer keg she’d somehow commandeered from the Schmidt Brewery down the block. This rain barrel was one of her domestic treasures. She had strategically placed it to catch rainwater that, with peasant shrewdness, she pronounced to be the purest water in the world, a sort of pagan holy water available to those housewives (too few!) sage enough to provide themselves with a giant beer keg to procure this elixir for their fortunate families. Hers was a hunting and gathering economy. She was the sort of housewife who practically cackled as she loaded the shelves of her cellar closet with pints and quarts of stewed plums and tomato sauce she had ‘put up.’”

– from “Showered with Bounty,” Minneapolis StarTribune, Sunday October 22, 2006

Ms. Hampl’s short story “The Bill Collector’s Vacation,” was awarded a 1999 Pushcart Prize and was cited in Best American Short Stories. Her essay, “A Week in the Word,” was included in Best American Essays 1999. Another essay, “Other People’s Secrets,” appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology for 2001.

Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, and Kenyon Review.