Join us for a poetry reading with Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Brenda Hillman, winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and William Carlos Williams Award, at Carnegie Library Lecture Hall at 2:00 PM on Saturday, April 10, 2027.
During this special event, Hass and Hillman—two of the most celebrated poets in the country—will read original poetry and translations of writers like Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, who visited the International Poetry Forum’s reading series in 1975 and 1986.
This event is presented by the International Poetry Forum in partnership with Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The event is free, but tickets will go fast; you can register here.
Brenda Hillman (c. Blue Flower Arts) & Robert Hass (c. Miriam Berkley)
Brenda Hillman bio:
Brenda Hillman has published more than ten collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press. In five of her most recent collections, Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018); Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire(2013); Practical Water (2009), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Cascadia (2001), each book receives her ‘sustained attention’ to one the natural elements. A Publishers Weekly starred review of Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days elucidates, “Having written four previous books each addressing one of the four traditional elements of nature, here she considers wood as a fifth element, making her hieroglyphic way through ‘forests of grief’ as might one of the book’s beloved beetles, ‘pressing/ their whole jeweled bodies/ in the beauty of the bark.’ Neither simply empirical nor transcendental, Hillman’s poetry takes what she calls ‘woodmind’—a sort of deep attention to natural processes—and applies it to notions of human action, recollection, imagination, and craft.”
Hillman’s forthcoming collection, Still House in the Desert: An Eco-contemplation (2026), offers meditations on time, space, and objects in houses, as well as lives of children, mothers & non-human creatures in domestic spaces. Like Hillman’s other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. Ama Codjoe said of the work: “Like the art of living, which may also be the art of dying, these capacious and luminous poems toggle between spirit and matter, emptiness and form. Hillman’s attention, her eco-contemplation, is a magnificent inventory of survival.”
She is also the author of Three Talks:Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality (2024). Hillman’s first prose collection, and with a forward by Brian Teare, this collection of short essays expands on the six M’s of the art of poetry make the form accessible in a novel way, exploring words that might appear incompatible but become dancing partners in Hillman’s artistic vision: metaphor and metonymy; meaning and mystery; magic and morality. First delivered as a series of talks at the University of Virginia, the essays maintain a casual, intimate tone. A consummate artist and technician, Hillman explores a wide array of poetic examples, focusing on method, subject matter, and inspiration to demonstrate how the skills offered by poetry have become critically important for our present moment.
Practical Water won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry. Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire received the International Griffin Poetry Prize for 2014, as well as the Northern California Book Award for Poetry and the California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry. Dean Rader wrote, “Seasonal Works With Letters On Fire is a profoundly humane work. In language that moves from the chatty to the experimental to the heightened to the rhetorical, Hillman shows us once again that poetry is itself a tireless worker, always on our behalf.”
Hillman is also the author of the collections Loose Sugar (1997), Bright Existence (1993), Death Tractates (1992), Fortress (1989), and White Dress (1985), and three chapbooks Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). Hillman has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). She co-translated, with Diallah Haidar, Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Ashur Etwebi, one of Libya’s most significant poets. In 2010 she co-translated Jeongrye Choi’s book of poems, Instances, released by Parlor Press. With Helen Hillman and Sebastião Macedo, she has translated At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar, to be published by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions in 2018.
In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Included in their list of “50 of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World,” Poets & Writers states, “[Hillman] reminds us that the language we use when ordering a sandwich is also the language we use to make art. Her environmental concerns prove writers can offer more than just aesthetic pleasure.” Hillman has been increasingly interested in the innovative and experimental lyric traditions, particularly in how the Romantic concepts of nature and spirit have manifested in contemporary ecological and political poetry. In her essay entitled “Split, Spark, and Space,” Hillman writes about the emergence of different kinds of lyric impulses in her writing: “The sense of a single ‘voice’ in poetry grew to include polyphonies, oddly collective dictations, and the process of writing itself. This happened in part because of a rediscovered interest in esoteric western tradition and in part because I came to a community of women who were writing in exploratory forms….A poetic method which had heretofore been based on waiting for insight suddenly had to accommodate process, and indeterminate physics, a philosophy of detached looking.”
Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism for social and environmental justice. She is married to poet Robert Hass.
Robert Hass bio:
Robert Hass is, first of all, a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. Widely read and much honored, he has brought the kind of energy in his poetry to his work as an essayist, translator, and activist on behalf of poetry, literacy, and the environment. Most notably, in his tenure as United States Poet Laureate, Robert Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, "imagination makes communities." He crisscrossed the country speaking at Rotary Club meetings, raising money to organize conferences such as "Watershed," which brought together noted novelists, poets, and storytellers to talk about writing, nature, and community. For Hass, everything is connected. When he works to heighten literacy, he is also working to promote awareness about the environment. Hass believes that natural beauty must be tended to and that caring for a place means knowing it intimately. Poets, especially, need to pay constant attention to the interaction of mind and environment. And when he is talking about poetry itself, whether Matsuo Basho's or Elizabeth Bishop's, Hass is both spontaneous and original, offering poetic insights that cannot be found in any textbook.
Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, and Summer Snow. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen by the Atlantic for its list of 'The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far).' He has also written books of essays including, Twentieth Century Pleasures, Now & Then, and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration Into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. His book of essays, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, is the recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz including, with David Frick, Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953, and he has edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Transtromer; The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp). He wrote the introduction to an of selected Walt Whitman poems titled Song of Myself: And Other Poems. He also wrote The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass. His next book will be a collection of essays titled A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World (Copper Canyon Press, May 5, 2026).
As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW), an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Hass is chairman of ROW’s board of directors, and judges their annual international environmental poetry and art contest for youth; he also wrote the introduction to the poetry collection, River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things. He is also a board member of International Rivers Network. Robert Hass was chosen as Educator of the Year by the North American Association on Environmental Education and, in 2005, elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Awarded the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics' Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, and the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award. Robert Hass is a Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley.
