Hastings Hensel is the author of the poetry collections Ballyhoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Winter Inlet, which won the 2014-2015 Unicorn Press First Book Contest, and the chapbook Control Burn, which won the 2011 Iron Horse Literary Review Single-Author Competition.

He is from Columbia, South Carolina, and he graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South before earning his M.F.A. from Johns Hopkins University. 

His writing has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Gray's Sporting Journal, The Greensboro Review, New South, storySouth, The Hopkins Review, PLEIADES, Valley Voices, Cave Wall, 32 Poems, and many others. He has been awarded the Tennessee Williams Fellowship at Sewanee, the South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, The Hopkins Review fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, and he has been named Grand Strand Artist of the Month. His magazine articles appear frequently in South Carolina Living, Grand Strand, South Carolina Wildlife and other magazines.

He teaches writing at Coastal Carolina University and is the owner of River Reader Kayaking in Murrells Inlet, SC, where he lives with Lee and Huck.