Rick Hilles is the author of Brother Salvage, selected by Kim Addonizio as winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize (named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine, which celebrates independent and small press publishing), and A Map of the Lost World (2012), a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award, both with the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Camargo Fellowship, and an Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University. The poems here are from a new poetry collection called The Empathy Machine; other poems in the collection have appeared or are forthcoming in Five Points, Literary Imagination, and Ploughshares.
