University Times

Rick Hilles, a Nashville, TN, author, is the 2005 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, awarded by the University of Pittsburgh Press for an outstanding first full-length book of poetry.

His manuscript, “Brother Savage,” was selected from several hundred entries and will be published by the Press in fall 2006.

Established in 1981, the Starrett prize is named for the Press’s first director. The prize carries a $5,000 award and publication in the Press’s poetry series. The series, edited by Ed Ochester, was founded in 1968 to publish the best in contemporary American poetry.

About his debut collection, Hilles said, “The poems in ‘Brother Savage’ evolved at a pace that taught me many things about patience and humility, which I continue to learn. The title poem, the last written for the collection, provided me with something like an aerial view,” he explained, “a unifying vision for every poem in the manuscript.”

Hilles has been published widely in magazines and literary journals including Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic and Salmagundi. He was the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar for 2002-2003 and has received fellowships from the Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford University. A native of northeastern Ohio, Hilles lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University.