Photo by Rome Morgan
"I love when a group of poems gathers personal experience or emotion, and connects that to a social justice issue. The poet here gives us all parts of themselves, their unique visions and commentary, but also the complex emotions tied to those ideals." |
AboutGwendolyn Ann Hill, originally from Iowa City, IA, earned her B.A. from Oregon State University, where she was awarded the 2015 Provost’s Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Academy of American Poets’ Prize. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas, where she has been awarded the 2016 Carolyn Walton Cole First Year Fellowship, the 2017 Lily Peter Fellowship, the 2018 James T. Whitehead Award, and the 2019 Harrison/Whitehead Founders’ Fellowship.
Her writing focuses on the intersections between colonization and environmental catastrophe, and her complicity—both personal and familial. Although she has taken her husband’s name since marriage, she writes under her maiden name to better align herself with the family members whose actions she calls out—descendants of Mayflower settlers. Her work received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and appears in or is forthcoming from Poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Narrative. During the 2018-2019 school year, she developed and taught a Special Topics Composition Class at the University of Arkansas, focused on Ecological Literacy—the applied, practiced, and situated skills, learning processes, and text used for reasoning about and making sense of the Earth. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas and serves as the Educational Director for the Open Mouth Reading Series, with whom she is developing a series of Environmental Writing workshops, to launch in spring 2020. |
