Robert Hill Long

Robert Hill Long graduated in 1975 from Davidson College, where his poetry was awarded a prize by Donald Hall. He received an M.F.A. in 1983 at the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers; in 1984 he was founding director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. He has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council (1986), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988), and the Oregon Arts Commission (1997), and helped the National Writers’ Union organize in North Carolina and Massachusetts. He has been teaching at the University of Oregon since 1991, and has also taught at Clark University, the University of Hartford, and Smith College.

His first book, The Power to Die, was published by Cleveland State University in 1987. The poet Robert Morgan wrote, “Robert Hill Long’s poems have the feel of land and history seen in moments of personal definition, seen through the lens of a family. His voice speaks in long and fluent lines with both freedom and formal assurance, of the experience of war, and of the war and peace of human affection. It is a voice that praises the voluptuous body of earth, and incorporates the sad flotsam of a family, of mortality. At times wickedly funny, at others haunted by the legend and landscape of America, his poems are always politically informed and alert, and our poetry is the richer.”

The Work of the Bow won the 1995 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. Thomas Lux characterized The Work of the Bow as “intense, edgy but at the same time serene; it builds and moves like a river. There are poems here that are so human and alive they will break your heart and end up leaving it better.” P. H. Liotta wrote, “in the decade since the poet’s first book, Robert Hill Long has matured his extraordinary powers. I expect that he will be one of the poets most valued of his generation, and one of the few to consistently bear in mind when those who succeed us will try to recall what American poetry was all about before the end of the millennium.” A collection of prose poems set in New Orleans, The Effigies, was published by Plinth Books of New England in 1998.

His poems and prose poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 1995, Flash Fiction, and The Best of The Prose Poem, and published in journals across America, including, DoubleTake, High Plains Literary Review, Hudson Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Manoa, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, The Prose Poem, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, STAND (UK), The Sun, Taos Review, Virginia Quarterly Review (where his poem “To an Uneaten Shrimp in a Sausalito Café” was awarded the 1999 Balch prize) and Zyzzyva. Excerpts from his most recent books are archived online at Web del Sol, an literary web-matrix based in Washington, D.C. (www.webdelsol.com/long/).