After graduating from college with her newly minted English degree, Hiller Spires couldn’t wait to tell her favorite high school teacher that she had chosen a teaching career too.
“I remember knocking on her door and telling her I was going to teach 12th grade English just like she taught me,” Hiller says. “It was around 1980, and she had retired by then, but she was thrilled.”
The teacher’s name was Laura Inabinet, and Hiller loved her for her strict demeanor and the high standards she set for her students at Hartsville High School in South Carolina.
“Not everybody liked her because she was so stern and didn’t suffer fools gladly, but I thought she was brilliant,” Hiller says. “The way she taught literature made me come alive, and I’m so glad I was able to tell her about how she influenced me and that she was the reason I became an English teacher.”
After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Tennessee Temple University, Hiller taught high school in Chattanooga for two years before taking her passion for education to new heights. She pursued an academic career at the University of South Carolina while earning her master’s and Ph.D. degrees.
She joined the faculty in the College of Education at North Carolina State University in 1987 and embarked on a 35-year career there before retiring as a professor and associate dean of the College of Education in 2022. She was also the founding director of the university’s William & Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. Today, she holds the title of executive director and professor emerita at NCSU.
Rather than resting on her laurels in retirement, Hiller immediately founded Margie’s Books, a donor advised fund in the Triangle Community Foundation that provides books for educators and children in under-resourced educational communities.
Hiller led NC State’s Exploring Culture and Education in China study abroad course in 2019. Contributed photo
To say Hiller loves books is an understatement. They’ve always been an integral part of her life, and she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t surrounded by them.
“Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my mother, Margie Spires, taking me to the Hartsville library and helping me find books on topics I was interested in,” she says. “She always made books personal, and that memory has stuck in my head.”
Hiller calls her mother her biggest cheerleader.
“If I needed or wanted to do something, she would always figure out a way,” she says. “I appreciated that, and we were so close.”
Margie died in 2019, but she lives on through the organization Hiller named in her honor, and which strives to ensure kids have access to books the way she did for her daughter.
“I firmly believe that the ability to read is a fundamental universal right, and so I’ve devoted my life to that in a lot of different ways,” she says. “But it all comes down to getting a kid excited about reading and inspiring them to continue to read for pleasure and for lifelong learning.”
Recognized as a prolific academic researcher, Hiller focuses on how teachers engage culturally and academically with diverse students. As the founding director of the New Literacies Collaborative at the Friday Institute, she has collaborated with diverse educators and students to develop new literacy innovations across North Carolina and around the world.
Looking back on earlier years, she recalls how innovation sat at the intersection of research and learning.
Hiller A. Spires and her mother, Margie. Contributed photo
“We were constantly writing grants, innovating, and exploring technology and digital learning, especially in the early days when tech was just taking off,” Hiller says. She can still hear the voice of the late William C. Friday, who served for 30 years as president of the UNC System, when she recalls his advice: “Change is the only constant in life.”
As part of her international work, Hiller played an integral role in building the Suzhou North America High School, a state-of-the-art American curriculum school in Suzhou, China. She helped design the school, including developing a global curriculum with emerging technologies and collaborative learning spaces.
She calls that opportunity “an educator’s lifelong dream.”
“I did a lot of research on international schools, and it was just so much fun,” Hiller says. “It started out as a high school, grades 9 through 12, and now it includes middle school.”
Today, she finds joy in new ways by providing educational services to communities nearby and around the world. She is president-elect of the North Carolina Reading Association and continues the mission of Margie’s Books.
“It often comes down to teachers who need certain books, but their library doesn’t have enough copies and the parents can’t afford to buy them,” she says. “So, Margie’s Books can step in and provide a grant to pay for them.”
She says she’d love to have Margie’s Books projects in every state in the United States and in every country around the world, and she’s off to a great start. She has provided books to schools in Africa and Türkiye, and she reckons she has distributed over 5,000 books in the three years since launching Margie’s Books.
An artist with a studio called the House of Hiller, she paints nonrepresentational works that depict lines, shapes, color, and rich textures.
She uses her past to chart her future and doesn’t just dream of possibilities: She pursues them with passion and turns them into reality, preferring to take action rather than to stay safe and do what she knows.
“You can often see a pathway, but you have to get started and take the necessary steps to get something going,” she says. “I think that’s what has set me apart. You know NC State University’s motto is ‘Think and Do.’ I like to think, but doing something is just as important or even more important than thinking about it.”
With all her accomplishments, Hiller’s joy comes from engaging in projects larger than herself.
“I think I have always gotten an excitement and a motivation from stepping out and trying to do something when I know that it’s for the greater good,” she says. “That’s my guiding principle.”
And nothing gives her greater joy than running the organization that bears her mother’s name. It keeps her just a whisper away.
“What I love about Margie’s Books is that I get to say my mother’s name several times a day,” Hiller says. “It is so cool to be able to do that.”
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