The Poet and the Poem
2026-27 Series

photo by Brett Hall Jones

Featured Brenda Hillman

Click here for Brenda Hillman podcast.mp3

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 as well as twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In A Few Minutes Before Later (2022) and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a current fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hillman has received the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She has edited many books, including an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems (1995); two books by Richard O. Moore, co-edited with Garrett Caples and Paul Ebenkamp; and The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, co-edited with Patricia Dienstfrey (Wesleyan, 2003). She has also co-translated three books: Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi (2011), Instances by Jeongrye Choi (2011), and At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar (2018). Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality, her first book of prose essays, was published in 2024. Hillman currently serves as poetry director of the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and as a regular faculty member at the Napa Valley Writers Conference. She is Emerita Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother and a grandmother and is married to poet Robert Hass.

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