Name Rick Hilles Role Poet | Education Columbia University Awards Whiting Awards | |
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Books Brother Salvage, A Map of the Lost World | ||
Festival della Poesia di Genova - 9 giugno, parte III
Rick Hilles is an American poet.
Contents
Life
Rick Hilles was born in Canton, Ohio (on November 25) and grew up in North Canton (formerly "New Berlin"), Ohio, where he attended North Canton Montessori before entering the public schools, receiving his diploma from Hoover High School.
After receiving a scholarship to attend the Columbus College of Art & Design (where he studied drawing, design, and painting intensively for a year), he received his B.A. and L.S.M. from Kent State University and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Columbia University.
His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Salmagundi, Witness, Missouri Review, and translations have appeared in Field and Harper's.
He was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he taught creative writing and poetry. He has also done graduate work at Rice and the University of Houston, where he also taught. From 2001 to 2005, he was a Visiting Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Michigan, where he taught poetry courses in literature and creative writing.
Since 2005, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in literature and creative writing (poetry) as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University.
Awards
Works
Anthologies
Books
Reviews
If Brother Salvage were Rick Hilles’, say, third collection, not his first as it is; if the versatility and dynamism of voice in these poems signaled a poet’s maturation from the safer outings of his youth; if we could’ve foreseen this kind of command of histories and their peculiar narrators, the book would merely astonish. Instead, Rick Hilles has leapt onto poetry’s stage in a debut both transporting and grounding, clever though never once inclined to wink at you.
Rick Hilles's first collection, is constructed upon an ambitious intellectual edifice that both grounds and ties together the disparate personal and historical materials of the poems. The books central metaphor is that of the genizah, a Hebrew word for "hiding place," which an epigraph to the title poem explains is "a depository where old and/or worn-out secular, holy & heretical books are kept inviolate ... Genizot serve the twin purpose of protecting what they contain and preventing their more dangerous contents from causing harm."