Donna Hilbert's latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer's Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows' Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Other poems on the web by Donna Hilbert:
"Once, Time"
Two poems
Two poems
"Thank You Note"
"Credo"
"Dear John Letter to My Uterus"

Donna Hilbert's Website.

About Enormous Blue Umbrella:

"Donna Hilbert is a master of the shorter poem. Like Jean Valentine and Kay Ryan before her, she constructs intricate yet accessible pieces so seamlessly built, so filled with quiet wonder, that you want to go back and read them again just to see how it was done. The new poems in Enormous Blue Umbrella are no exception, as Hilbert once again brings her artist's sharp eye to the everyday world, asking: 'Who wouldn't want to capture light/the way a child traps fireflies/on a summer night?' Savor these open-hearted poems, and 'greet again the great window opening' inside of you."
—James Crews

"Who wouldn't want to capture light, asks Donna Hilbert in her full-throated collection Enormous Blue Umbrella, and believe me reader, she does, offering poems bursting with authenticity and a musicality of language. Here an iron skillet, there a finicky coffee pot, dreams of big purple hair and peach lips, herons, barnacles, boats, a menagerie of life experiences balanced on the eyelash/ of a blinking god, shadowed by an overarching presence of grief's bad weather. I admire the wisdom in this voice and the way the poet greets each new unpredictable day with so much forgiveness and grace."
—Kari Gunter-Seymour

"An oceanic backdrop takes us from grief to rebirth, and all the life that happens while we're on the mend, as scales weigh present joys against past losses. Donna Hilbert embraces her mind's oscillations as she navigates new ways to fall in love with the world. Poems in Enormous Blue Umbrella offer notes of tranquil bliss tinged with bittersweetness. Hilbert excites the imagination with swift poetic turns that will grip readers."
—Mark Danowsky

"Like a clever chef, able to make a delicious stew from scraps, Donna Hilbert takes what is broken, flawed and imperfect, then she transforms these unlikely ingredients into poems that are nourishing, generous and charged with praise. These short poems are unswervingly human as they take us from the back deck to the deli to the dentist, and they remind us how to find sweetness in honeysuckle, how to celebrate the blank page of a day, how to listen as morning itself sings."
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer