Brenda Hillman

1951 –
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Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, on March 17, 1951. She was educated at Pomona College and received her MFA at the University of Iowa. Her upbringing in a deeply religious Baptist family surfaces in many of her poems, especially those that appear in Loose Sugar (Wesleyan University Press, 1997) and the California mission poems of Cascadia (Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

Hillman has authored several full-length collections, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Until Later (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize. Her poems have also been collected in three chapbooks The Firecage (A+Bend Press, 2000); Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995); and Coffee, 3 A.M. (The Penumbra Press, 1982).

Hillman’s work has been called eclectic, mercurial, sensuous, and luminescent. In an interview in Rain Taxi, Hillman said

It is impossible to put boundaries on your words, even if you make a poem. Each word is a maze. So, you are full of desire to make a memorable thing and have the form be very dictated by some way that it has to be. But the poem itself is going to undo that intention. It’s almost like you’re knitting a sweater and something is unraveling it on the other end.

Hillman is also the coeditor, along with Patricia Dienstfrey, of The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), and the editor of a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems published by Shambhala Press in 1995.

Hillman’s honors include awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America, along with a Bay Area Book Reviewer’s Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Hillman received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2012. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts And Sciences in 2017 and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2016.

Hillman has taught at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference and the University of California, Berkeley. A professor emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California, she serves as the director of poetry for the Community of Writers and lives on the West Coast with her husband, the poet Robert Hass.