Linda Hillringhouse holds an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry. She was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014) and the second-place winner of Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012), which was judged by 2011-2012 United States Poet Laureate Philip Levine. She has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Lips; New Ohio Review; Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry; Oberon Poetry Magazine; Prairie Schooner; The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. Hillringhouse is a self-taught painter who has shown her work at the Newark Museum; Paterson Museum; the Yale School of Art, among other venues. Her work is included in the Hamilton Club Art Collection, Paterson, NJ. She was selected for inclusion in the 20th Century Self-Taught Artists Archive Collection at The Museum of American Folk Art in New York City.

Books by Linda Hillringhouse:

Other poems on the web by Linda Hillringhouse:
Three poems

About The Things I Didn't Know to Wish For:

"Linda Hillringhouse's poems are lovely to read and beautifully crafted, at times bitter, ironic and unforgiving, as well as honest and original. She is a truth-sayer and she refuses to compromise, and the poems are emblazoned with this refusal. Whether she is being critical of the culture she grew up in, or tenderly remembers the love and friendship, the voice is the same, and more than anything else, she is seized by the sheer mystery that underlies and permeates her reality. A good way to begin is with the very last poem, "Nieves Penitentes," an example of the broken world she writes so much about. Start there, or start with "...I couldn't stop wondering how it would feel to be that / at home in the universe" in "The Royal Mineral Water Hospital, Bath." Or just start at the beginning and read through, with great delight, as I did."
—Gerald Stern

"The poems in Linda Hillringhouse's The Things I Didn't Know to Wish For are beautifully polished and glow like jewels. Most importantly, these poems are so brave and bold they will blow the top of your head off. No matter how many times I read this book, I am moved to tears and laughter. These poems make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and that is my ultimate test for great poetry."
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan