Donna Hilbert

Life

Hilbert was born in 1946 in Grandfield, Oklahoma, a small town near the Texas border south of Deep Red Creek and north of the Red River. Her family was Methodist. At the age of seven, she moved with her parents to the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, first in Van Nuys, then Reseda, and finally in Northridge. At the age of eighteen, she married into an upper middle class Catholic family. Hilbert and her husband raised three sons. In summer 1998 her husband was killed in a freak bicycle accident by a motorist driving home from a methadone clinic. She has lived in Long Beach, CA since 1998.

Career

Hilbert did not begin writing until after her father's death, when she was 34 years old. By that time, she had thoroughly committed herself to the domestic heavy-lifting of many women in her generation, putting obligations as wife and mother before her own education or career. But Hilbert had long fostered an emerging ambition on her own by studying such diverse writers as Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, Graham Greene, Omar Kayam, and Grace Metalious. She eventually completed an undergraduate degree, in political science, from California State University, Long Beach (in 1978), as well as a graduate degree, in psychotherapy, from the California Family Study Center (in 1987).

In 1980, Hilbert began publishing poems in literary journals, and an editor at Event Horizon Press noticed her work, launching her debut collection, Mansions, in 1990. Her subsequent books include a fiction collection, Women Who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them (1994), which won the Staple First Editions prize in England, and five other books of poetry: Deep Red (1993), Feathers and Dust (1996), Transforming Matter (2000), Greatest Hits (2001), and Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2004). Hilbert’s writing is not easily slotted into a single tradition; she experiments with free-verse lyricism, formalism, and prose poetry. In more recent work, one can find elements of sardonic allegory, even surrealism. World Parade Books will publish her latest collection, titled The Green Season, in 2009.

Long Beach poet and fiction writer Gerald Locklin authored Two Novellas in collaboration with Hilbert and has since shared the lectern with her many times at readings in the U.S. and United Kingdom. He describes Hilbert’s writing as “musical,” “imagistic,” and “much more poetic than most contemporary poetry without lapsing into the ‘pseudo-poetic’ or trite.” He also stresses that the trajectory of Hilbert’s career outside the traditional academy has been an unquestionable asset to her development as a writer: “She probably has more in common with the unselfconscious women writers of earlier generations than the more professionally or commercially driven women of our MFA generation.”

In the past three years, Hilbert has experimented in other genres, including nonfiction, playwriting, and the novel. For PEN USA, she continues to teach workshops for emerging writers.

Most recently, Hilbert's life and work since the tragic loss of her husband have become the subjects of an independent biopic, Grief Becomes Me: A Poet's Journey, produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Christine Fugate. The first installment of the film premiered at the annual Kentucky Women Writers Conference in 2004.