The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature Brenda Hillman and Rowan Ricardo Phillips on Thursday, March 6, at 7 p.m. in Winants Auditorium in Graves Hall on the Hope College Campus.
Both writers will also participate in a question-and-answer session on Thursday, March 6, at 3:30 p.m., in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium in the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Ariz., and completed her undergraduate degree at Pomona College and her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. Her upbringing in a deeply religious Baptist family surfaces in many of her poems, especially in “Loose Sugar” and the California mission poems of “Cascadia.”
She is the author of more than 10 books of poetry, including “Practical Water”; “Loose Sugar,” which was a finalist for National Book Critic’s Circle; and “Bright Existence,” a finalist for Pulitzer Prize. Hillman is also the co-editor, along with Patricia Dienstfrey, of “The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood,” and the editor of a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Hillman is the 2012 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her other 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 has taught at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference and the University of California, Berkeley. She holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif., and lives in the Bay Area with her husband, the poet Robert Hass.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of mutli-award winning book “The Ground: Poems,” published in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “The Ground” won a 2013 WhitingWriters' Award, the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award in Poetry. It was also a finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.
Phillips is also the author of a book of criticism, “When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness,” and the translator of Salvador Espriu’s classic Catalan collection of short stories, “Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth.”
Born and raised in New York City, he is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University, where he attained his doctorate in English literature. Phillips has taught in Harvard’s History and Literature Program and Columbia’s Graduate School of the Arts, and is currently an associate professor of English at Stony Brook University, where he directs the Poetry Center.
Additional information is available online at jrvws.org.
Graves Hall is located at 263 College Ave., between 10th and 12th streets. The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., on Columbia Avenue at 10th Street.