Rick Hilles, acclaimed poet and assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt, was named one of 10 recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Awards given for “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.” Author of the award-winning poetry collection Brother Salvage, Hilles received a $50,000 prize from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, based in New York.
Brother Salvage won the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press) and was named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine. Hilles has been an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholar, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the Ruth and Jay C.
Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also received the Larry Levis Editor’s Prize in Poetry from the Missouri Review. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Salmagundi and Witness.