Three New Anthologies

I'm proud to be included in three new anthologies out in 2024. These collections are lovingly compiled by the editors and showcase an array of talented poets, writers, and artists. I hope you'll check them out. 

Beacon Radiant, Great Weather for Media

Braving the Body, Harbor Editions 

Maintenant 18, Three Rooms Press




Writer Ann Humphreys offered a hula hooping class as a way to promote her book at our alumni conference (Wally Camp)


 Recent Readings


Wally Camp, Mt. Holyoke College, Mass, August 8, 2023


A Persistence of Cormorants, Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club,
Brooklyn, NY, August 6, 2023


May 22, 2022: One of the best parts of writing poetry is when you push aside your keyboard to gather with other poets. A new favorite gathering/reading opportunity is A Persistence of Cormorants, curated by Gerald Wagoner at (outside) the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club in Brooklyn. 

Here I am with Lisa Andrews (The Inside Room, Indolent Books) and Amy Holman, literary consultant and poetry editor for Westchester Review. 

I also met Iris Dunkle who was in town to hear Nicole Callihan and Sanjana Nair read. Iris is poetry program director for the Napa Valley Writers Conference, which offers its participants a panel discussion about first books. It's a crazy challenge to get attention for your fledglings. So it was no small thing when I received this generous review and nomination from Jennie Hann for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for a first book.  What I didn't realize until just now is that Jennie's review is a perfect introduction to my new manuscript in progress. In Practice Baby, I bring to the foreground the embedded story of unwanted pregnancy that hovers at the margins of Crossing Pleasure Avenue


There is a powerful story embedded here, one with its origins in the era before abortion was legal in the United States. This history hovers, ghostlike, at the margins of the collection. In the haunting opening poem, for instance, the speaker recalls how, as a child, she would trace the branches of the family tree in her grandmother’s bible, adding, “Back then I had no reason / to doubt the space beneath my name would one day be filled with anything / less than desire.” Later, in the book’s title poem, the speaker, now an adult on a day-trip to the seashore, describes watching a mother turtle lead its newborn young to the water’s edge, then returning indoors to join friends “jostling for a place at the end of the bar, / to sit with our handbags swaddled / to our chests like the babies / we never had.” Finally, in a poignant Emersonian homage entitled “On Leaving” (which, fittingly, ends the volume), she relates how a “Mama Osprey” swoops down, “so close I can see her underbelly,” hanging suspended over her head for an instant as though in judgment. “How could she know that I was a mother too? / That unlike her, I had a choice.”  —Jennie Hann, NBCC fellow



May 15, 2022: It was a beautiful day to read poetry alongside Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal in all its historic cleanup glory. I read from Crossing Pleasure Avenue and new work from a manuscript in progress, Practice Baby and shared a program with Suzanne Wise, Sarah Sala and Safia Jama.  (photo by Mette Riis)




Next up: 

Launch of No, Dear issue 28: WATER
Saturday, June 11, 2022
2-4 pm

225 Rodgers Avenue, Brooklyn

btwn President and Union

Upcoming Events

Thurs, April 7, 2022
Cafe Amore
147 Chambers Street
New York, NY
6:30 pm
with Hillary Keel, hosted by Jennifer Juneau

Sunday, May 15, 2022
A Persistence of Cormorants
Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club
165 2nd Street
Brooklyn, NY
1:30 pm
with Suzanne Wise, Safia Jama, Sarah M Sala, hosted by Gerald Wagoner


“We take our pleasure as we can,” Karen Hildebrand writes in the title poem to Crossing Pleasure Avenue, in a voice filled with desire tempered by loss. And there is much pleasure in this book of terse lyrics that engages the reader with humor, brio, and bite.” —Sharon Dolin

Hildebrand honors the women who have come before and the women who we are. She is funny, fervent, and fierce. Crossing Pleasure Avenue is delightfully profound. I’d take a walk with her poetry any day! —Denise Duhamel

Crossing Pleasure Avenue, reminds us of the strangeness of the everyday and the pleasure in those ripe moments when the past and the present buckle and overlap.” —Joanna Fuhrman

 

Announcing the arrival of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books, 2018)

Reading at the Bryant Park Reading Room
Tues., May 22, 2018 with fellow Indolent Books
authors Nicole Callihan, Lisa Andrews, Jenna Le, John Deming. Thank you, Paul Romero!

Poets Joanna Fuhrman and Kat Georges joined me May 8, at the venerable KGB Lit Bar to launch the collection with NYC friends.
After the book launch, I traveled to Boulder, CO, to join Steven Taylor's Songworks at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. I wrote and sang "Raccoons In The Night" with the band.


Book signing at AWP, Tampa, FL, March 2018

Where Dance and Poetry Meet

7.16.17. I just returned from two fabulous weeks in Lisbon as part of the Disquiet International Literary Program. What a great experience it was to work with the poets Denise Duhamel and Terri Witek and to learn about the literary history of Portugal. I was thrilled to read a couple of poems at Sao Luiz Teatro in the same room where Pina Bausch performed Cafe Muller for the last time, May, 2008.

photo by Steven Tagle, July 2017.