Hilles, Rick

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Hilles, Rick

PERSONAL:

Education: Kent State University, B.A., L.S.M.; Columbia University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Vanderbilt University, Station B #351654, 2301 Vanderbilt Pl., 427 Benson Hall, Nashville, TN 37235. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, former faculty member; University of Wisconsin, Madison, former faculty member; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, assistant professor of creative writing. James Merrill Writer-in-Residence, James Merrill House, Stonington, CT, 2007.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University, 1995-97; Larry Levis Editors' Prize in poetry, Missouri Review, 1999; Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellowship, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1999-2000; Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, 2002-03; Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize, New England Poetry Club, 2003; Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Pitt Poetry Series, 2005, for Brother Salvage; Pushcart Prize nomination, 2007; Book of the Year Award for poetry, ForeWord magazine, 2007, for Brother Salvage.

WRITINGS:

A Visionary's Company & Other Poems, limited edition, Parallel Press, 2000.

Preparing for Flight (poetry), limited edition, Puddinghouse Press, 2005.

Brother Salvage: Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2006.

Contributor of poetry and translations to journals, including Ploughshares, Nation, New Republic, Witness, Salmagundi, Missouri Review, Harper's, and Poetry.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rick Hilles is an academic, award-winning poet, and translator. After publishing two limited edition collections of verse, his first major collection, Brother Salvage: Poems, received positive critical attention. A work addressing the Holocaust, Brother Salvage is based on a memoir by Tadzik "Ted" Stabholz, himself a concentration camp survivor. While conducting some research before penning his verses, Hilles came across the Hebrew word genizah, which means "hiding place," a place of protection. Hilles felt this was a fitting term for his book, in which he sought to preserve the memory of his friend Ted and of those who died in the Holocaust. "I wondered if the poem might provide a way for me to contain, or subdue (insofar as the concept would allow it) at least some of the darkness threaded to these tragic lives," he told an interviewer for the Wick Poetry Center.

Brother Salvage may be considered in two parts. The first half has an epistolary nature, a dialogue between Hilles and Stabholz that is based on the latter's memoir; the "second half explores the quest for a visionary moment," explained Benjamin S. Grossberg in his Antioch Review assessment. Grossberg continued: "Although the halves of Brother Salvage don't cohere as fully as they might, the collection demonstrates considerable range of voice and mood." The critic went on to praise Hilles for adeptly managing to use the example of other people's lives to find illumination in himself. The verses thus "have a maturity and power rare in a debut," Grossberg asserted. Aaron Baker, writing in the Southern Review, felt that Hilles sometimes lapses into an overly prosaic style, yet praised the writer as "an extremely visual poet, and his poems show a painterly skill with words." Library Journal contributor E.M. Kaufman stated that Brother Salvage is filled with "rich and gentle poems; a fine debut."