Brenda Hillman – In a Few Minutes Before Later

In conversation with Robert Hass

Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass join us for a reading and conversation about In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan U.P.), the latest collection from the International Griffin Poetry Prize-winner.

“[Hillman’s] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful.” –Harvard Review

This event will be held at the Dance Palace. Registration is required. Books will be available for purchase at the venue.

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences in her new collection In a Few Minutes Before Later.

At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil.

Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

Brenda Hillman is an activist, writer, editor, and teacher. She has published ten collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press, including Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California and as a staff poet at Community of Writers.

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.