Life

Rick Hilles was born in Canton, Ohio (on November 25th) 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

Kent State University

Kent State University is a public research university located in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university has eight campuses around the northeast Ohio region with the main campus in Kent being the largest...

 and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

.

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

Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

.

Awards

• 2009 Camargo Fellow, Cassis, France (Fall).
• 2008 Whiting Writers' Award
  Whiting Writers' Award
  The Whiting Writers' Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and has been presented since 1985. As of 2007, winners receive US $50,000.-External links:**...
  
  .
• 2006 Brother Salvage named 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine.
• 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
  Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
  The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize is a major American literary award for a first full-length book of poetry in the English language.This prize of the University of Pittsburgh Press in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA was initiated by Ed Ochester and developed by Frederick A. Hetzel. The prize is...
  
   for Brother Salvage (published in September 2006 by the University of Pittsburgh Press).
• 2002-2003 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
  Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
  The Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship is given annually to a U.S.-born poet to spend one year outside North America in a country the recipient feels will most advance his or her work....
  
  .
• 1999-2000 Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• 1995-1997 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Anthologies

• From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. Lost Hills Books, 2008.
• Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. Time Being Books, 2007.
• Jewish in America. University of Michigan Press, 2004.
• Red, White, & Blues: Poetic Vistas on the Promise of America. University of Iowa Press, 2004.
• I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems About Ohio. University of Akron Press, 2002.

Books

• A Map of the Lost World. University of Pittsburgh Press. (forthcoming January 2012). ISBN 978-0-8229-6182-6.
• Preparing for Flight and other poems. Pudding House Publications, 2005. ISBN 1589982797.

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."

External links

• "Interview with Rick Hilles", Wick Poetry Center, October 2, 2007

• "Interview: Poet--Rick Hilles", The Southeast Review, September 26, 2010