Brenda Hillman

Born: 27 March 1951

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, on March 27, 1951. She was educated at Pomona College and received her MFA at the University of Iowa. Her upbringing in a deeply religious Baptist family surfaces in many of her poems, especially those that appear in Loose Sugar (1997) and the California mission poems of Cascadia (2001). She is the author of eleven poetry collections published by Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), and of Three Talks (2022), a finalist for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize. Her work has been called eclectic, mercurial, sensuous, and luminescent. (Source)

Poems by Brenda Hillman

Styrofoam Cup by Brenda Hillman

August 16, 2025

“thou unravished unbride / unthou unbride” — Brenda Hillman

Poems translated by Brenda Hillman

The Five-Thousand-Year-Old Heart I’ve Swallowed by Jeongrye Choi

August 19, 2024

“Do the flowers bloom and fall and bloom and fall without knowing the endless loneliness of my bare feet?” — Jeongrye Choi