The Hill Writes Blog

I have long admired Cleaver international literary journal for its professional, edgy, glittering support of poetry and the arts. So it was with great joy that I got word that my poem "Untitled Mural" had garnished third place in their 2025 visual poetics contest. All the more so because visual poetry is really new to me and not something I have embraced, but rather something I fell into trying at the encouragement of colleagues at the VCFA Summer Manuscript Workshop. In fact

Unlikely Stories is a web literary magazine that has been wrestling with sociopolitical issues since 1998. Their editors describe the mag as activist, transgressive, and unapologetically antifascist. I am pleased as punch, therefor, to have my long-short-story (publisher Jonathan Penton classifies it as a novella) of near-future political apocalypse appearing on the pages of this edition of Unlikely Stories Six. The Last Two Chocolate Chip Cookies in Manhattan was written jus

Plant-Human Quarterly is a stunning online journal that is a project of the Plant-Human Communication Project of the Netherlands, supported by the Dutch Creative Industries Fund. The aim of the Plant-Human Communication Project, and Plant-Human Quarterly, is to bridge science, technology and art to restore our sense of belonging within, and thus our responsibility toward, natural ecosystems. I feel extremely grateful to have two poems in this Autumn Equinox edition -- you can

The Meadow Suite spiraled into being over the final three days of a creative residency at the In Situ Polyculture Commons in Saxtons River, Vermont. I was there to finish up a poetry manuscript I'd been wrestling with, but found the golden meadow calling -- insistently. No poet can resist such a call. I started writing about the meadow on Saturday night, long, running threads of thoughts that went on for hours. I found myself musing on the ephemeral nature of a meadow, on th

Earlier this summer I had the privilege of seeing a poem written collaboratively by myself and Virginia Mazzoni appear in the international, bilingual journal Open Doors/Porte Aperte. As a neophyte student of Italian, I try my hand at writing poetry in Italian, simply because that's one of the ways I process language, so it gives me a chance to learn and develop while comfortably on my home turf, so to speak. My dear friend and Italian teacher Gin Mazzoni is also a poet, and

https://sonnetcontest.org/2025-winners/2025-winners-sonnets The Maria Faust Sonnet Contest is something I mark ahead on my calendar every year,, seeing as how I am quite admittedly addicted to sonnets. Some years ago I was privileged to received one of the contest's Laureate Prizes, and participated online in their fabulous reading event. This year, I could not be more delighted to have my sonnet The Leveret be named one of the contest's Top Four Sonnets. The contest assemble