Brenda Hillman

A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Since 2021 she has directed the poetry program at the Community of Writers summer workshops in Olympic Valley.

• Name — Brenda Hillman • Born — 27 March 1951 • Birthplace — Tucson, Arizona, U.S. • Occupation — Professor, poet • Education — Pomona College (BA) University of Iowa (MFA) • Genre — Poetry • Spouse — Leonard Michaels Robert Hass • Awards — Griffin Poetry Prize Los Angeles Times Book Prize Pushcart Prize

She was educated at Pomona College, and received her M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California. She also taught during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Hillman met the writer Leonard Michaels (1933-2003) in Iowa City in 1975, they were married in Berkeley in 1976, which ended in divorce in the late 1980s. They had a daughter together. Currently, she is married to the poet Robert Hass.

One of contemporary poetry's most eclectic and formally innovative writers, Brenda Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and document, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as “sensuous” and “luminescent,” Hillman's poetry investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality. In an interview with Sarah Rosenthal, Hillman described her own understanding of form: “It is the artist’s job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it. Allow form. And all artists have a different relationship to it, and a different philosophy of it… I think that when you are trying to open up a territory—in this case I was working with a desire to open the lyric—you have to be greedy, in that you want more than you can do. And you’re always bound to fail.” Brenda Hillman has published ten collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry. Her ninth collection of poetry, the final volume in her tetralogy of books about the classical elements, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), received the International Griffin Poetry Prize for 2014, as well as the Northern California Book Award for Poetry and the California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry. Her most recent book, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, won the 2019 Northern California Book Award, and has been described as “her most radical poetry collection yet.” In her interview with Rosenthal, Hillman concluded by admitting: “I hope that whatever experiment and opening and wildness and exploration the poem has to go through—and I do mean the poem because I feel like I am in its hands when I’m writing—that it keeps human experience recognizable.” Hillman is also the author of four chapbooks: Case Study (Genera, 1975), Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). With Paul Ebenkamp, she co-edited Writing the Silences, New California Poetry (2010). She co-translated, with Diallah Haidar, Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Ashur Etwebi, one of Libya's most significant poets. In 2010 she co-translated Jeongrye Choi's book of poems, Instances, released by Parlor Press. Hillman has been increasingly interested in the innovative and experimental lyric traditions, particularly in how the Romantic concepts of nature and spirit have manifested in contemporary poetry. In her essay entitled “Split, Spark, and Space,” Hillman writes about the emergence of different kinds of lyric impulses in her writing: “The sense of a single ‘voice’ in poetry grew to include polyphonies, oddly collective dictations, and the process of writing itself. This happened in part because of a rediscovered interest in esoteric western tradition and in part because I came to a community of women who were writing in exploratory forms...A poetic method which had heretofore been based on waiting for insight suddenly had to accommodate process, and indeterminate physics, a philosophy of detached looking.”

• The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000) • Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995) • Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982)

* * • Brenda Hillman, ed. (1995). The Pocket Emily Dickinson. Shambhala Publications.

• Diallah Haidar, Brenda Hillman, trans. Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Ashur Etwebi. • Brenda Hillman, co-trans. (2010). Jeongrye Choi. Instances. Parlor Press.

• Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan, eds. (2018). Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. Scarlet Tanager Books. • Melissa Tuckey, ed. (2018). Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. University of Georgia Press.

Brenda Hillman is recorded as having received Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and William Carlos Williams Award.