Rick Hilles

Printer’s Fist, by Melissa Range, has been selected as the 2025 winner of the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. The prize competition received more than 250 submissions. Printer’s Fist is scheduled for publication in March 2026 from Vanderbilt University Press. Range will be in residence for a week in spring 2026 to engage students, faculty and the greater community with her work. Read More

The new prize comes as Vanderbilt University marks its Sesquicentennial by honoring its strong connection to the arts.  Read More

Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography Nafissa Thompson-Spires, MA’05, PhD’09, was announced as one of 10 Whiting Award winners March 20 at a ceremony at the New York Historical Society. Thompson-Spires’ short story collection Heads of the Colored People (2018, Atria/37 INK) has been honored with a PEN Open Book Award,… Read More

Last fall, lovers of reading and writing of all ages gathered in Denver for a Commodore Classroom that doubled as a writing workshop led by Rick Hilles, associate professor of English, who also teaches in the university’s acclaimed MFA Program in Creative Writing. Read More

Commodore Classrooms are popular Vanderbilt chapter events that bring alumni and friends together for an engaging evening with a university professor. Read More

What’s remarkable about the M.F.A. program at Vanderbilt is that, although it’s among the best in the nation, it's not cutthroat like other highly regarded programs. In fact, Vanderbilt has adopted a model that seems the very opposite—one that fosters a tight-knit community based on feelings of cooperation and unity. Read More

Section #8 of “Nights and Days of 2007: Autumn” is from A Map of the Lost World by Rick Hilles, Read More