Brenda Hillman gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.
Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of eleven full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018) winner of the Northern California Book Award. In a Few Minutes Before Later , her latest collection, will be published in fall 2022. Hillman has also received the William Carlos Williams Prize from Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, co-edited two books by Richard O. Moore, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). She has worked as a co-translator of three books: Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi, Instances by Jeongrye Choi, and At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar, all from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her first book of prose essays, Three Talks, will be published by University of Virginia Press in spring 2023. She serves on the regular poetry staff at Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and at Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, a grandmother, and is married to poet Robert Hass.