Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking, winner of the tenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She was educated at the Johns Hopkins University, and took art courses at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she stayed on faculty for a year teaching poetry and writing. Since then, she has been a freelance writer and an events coordinator at an independent bookshop. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Unsplendid, Blackbird, Waccamaw, and elsewhere.
“Jaimee Hills is enviably gifted, exuberantly ingenious, smilingly audacious. Her language is, by turns, baroque, rococo, and precisely “contemporary”…. And it isn’t only the language that is inventive and provocative, so is the syntax. She plays with constructions as well as with idioms and with vocabulary, and as you read you have to keep your wits about you, as she does . . . Not, I think, since William Empson in the late 1920s and 1930s has there been such a nimble trickster of a poet.”
— Anthony Thwaite
