In Retrospect: An Interview with Sean Hill, Guest Judge of 2025 Family & Home Prize
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Sean Hill, the Guest Judge of our poetry prize which will have winners announced this month. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Hill’s body of work, from his early writing to his most recent compositions. His forthcoming collection with Milkweed Editions, The Negroes Send Their Love, contains “testaments and reckonings, recipes for survival and blueprints for futures imagined from the marrow of the past,” in the words of writer Sheree Renée Thomas. Here, he walks us through his life in poetry thus far, from early poems about owls to poems which gather up years of research, lived experience, and “possible futures.”
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Sean Hill: My first poem was about an owl. When I was twelve years old, I decided that, with my fascination with and love for animals, I would be a veterinarian when I grew up. And as soon as I could, I went to work for a veterinarian to gain some firsthand experience. One of my duties was taking care of a permanently injured great horned owl who resided at the clinic. And inspired by fantasy and science fiction novels, I also had aspirations of being a writer of such novels, but I never got beyond writing vignettes, which was a bit frustrating. In my first year of college a dormmate suggested I try writing a poem. And with that prompting, I wrote a brief poem about a great horned owl hunting in the night; it was a descriptive imagining of what the life of the owl I’d taken care of might have been if he hadn’t been maimed. As I remember it, the poem was evocative and had nice sonic qualities and movement, but most importantly I recognized it arrived at what felt like a kind of resolution or completeness. This was something my previous attempts at writing hadn’t achieved. And that made me realize I should try writing more poems. What I appreciate most about that poem is that it led on to the next poem and showed me poetry could be a path. That first poem was never published. The subject of the poem “Dawn Song 1991” in my first collection Blood Ties & Brown Liquor is that job at the vet clinic and the actual owl that inspired my first poem.
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle Blood Ties & Brown Liquor spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
SH: That’s a good question. I have to point to the sonnet series “B. Nov. 14, 1926: Grandmother Poems” as the poems that felt like a sea change in my writing and the poem “Nigger Street 1937” as the poem that made me feel that I might have a manuscript-length project on my hands. The voice in “B. Nov. 14, 1926: Grandmother Poems” is derived from an interview with one of my grandmothers. I was interested in seeing what I could do with that voice and a received form, the sonnet. And that interview also held the seed for “Nigger Street 1937,” which looks at the vibrant Black business district and social space in the Milledgeville of the mid twentieth century. The Black business district downtown on McIntosh Street was commonly known as Nigger Street during the Jim Crow era, in my grandmother’s day. During our interview she mentioned it casually by that name. I had never heard my grandmother use that word. And the place she described was one I didn’t know. It piqued my interest and drove me to talk to other older members of my family and community about their memories of that place. I believe, I wrote that poem in 1999 at my first Cave Canem Retreat in a workshop with Harryette Mullen. I don’t think I could have written that poem without Harryette and her work inspiring the image-driven associative play in it. It was that poem along with the Grandmother Poems that moved me think I had a larger project I could pursue.
That Black business district on McIntosh Street doesn’t exist anymore; it’s now municipal buildings and a small plaza with a commemorative marker acknowledging what was once there. A few years after writing that poem, while I was visiting home and running errand for my father, I found a painting hanging in a funeral home around the corner from McIntosh Street. When I saw it, I did a doubletake because I recognized it as McIntosh Street from my poem, a place I didn’t know but had time traveled to through the memories of my elders, and now I felt like I’d written an ekphrastic poem inadvertently. I felt like the painting corroborated my relatives’ memories and my poetic vision. It was painted by Frank Stanley Herring, a Pennsylvania native who married a woman from Milledgeville and moved there sometime in the 1930s. I’m very grateful that Herring painted that particular place and that was able to use it for the cover of Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.
Those two poems were the launching point for the exploration that is Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.
FP: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing your previous two collections teach you which you applied to your most recent collection?
SH: I want to acknowledge how fortunate I feel to have two (soon to be three) books. Each book has had its own singular path from writing to publication and beyond. Broadly, writing the previous two collections taught me to be as ambitious as I can be in my writing. Specifically, writing Blood Ties & Brown Liquor taught me how to think about a reader’s experience when ordering a manuscript. And with Dangerous Goods, I began to get comfortable with exploring the capaciousness of a poetry collection. With The Negroes Send Their Love, I’ve pushed myself to embrace genres as avenues leading to different modes of exploration and expression. They have all shown me that publishing is a collaborative process, a kind of relationship, and I’ve been fortunate in the folks that I’ve published books with. And I’ve also been fortunate in the folks who’ve published poems, essays, and stories with along the way to those books. I’m grateful to all the editors who’ve considered my work whether they’ve rejected it flatly or with a note of encouragement or accepted it provided I consider their editorial suggestions or accepted it enthusiastically. And I’m grateful to all the folks at the University of Georgia Press and at Milkweed Editions who’ve worked to get the books in the world.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, in particular, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
SH: My first poem was about an owl. And another early poem was inspired by driving around the countryside outside Athens, Georgia and seeing llamas and peacocks in a field. Birds continue to appear in my poems. From being born and raised in Georgia to now raising a son in Montana, I’ve called seven different states home, and I’ve been to all fifty states having driven to forty-nine of them. And I’m usually curious about what happened in a place before I arrived, whether that arrival was my birth or just showing up in a new place. And my experience of this nation as a Black man means I sometimes have to think about race. So, my subjects and themes have been and will likely always be family, place, home, migration, history, race, and nature. Those are definitely the themes and fascinations in The Negroes Send Their Love.
FP: In terms of the evolution of your hybrid collection, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, could you briefly map out the stages your manuscript went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
SH: That’s a big question. And The Negroes Send Their Love is a relatively big book. And I’ve been working on some part of, in some fashion, since 2007. So I’m not sure if I can be brief about it.
Before there was a manuscript, I was just working on poems. I usually have a couple threads of writing and rumination going at any given time that I can pick up and put down as life demands. There’s often a research-informed thread that I may not be actively writing but for which I am gathering material with good intentions. In 2007, I took a tour of the Old Governor’s Mansion in Milledgeville, and felt moved to find out more about the people who lived there through Gov. Joseph Emerson Brown’s administration, on the eve of and during the Civil War, particularly the enslaved Black folks. Eventually this interest would meet words and become the MANSION SUITE section of The Negroes Send Their Love. In 2009, I was awarded a residency at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia to work on the poems for what would be my second collection Dangerous Goods. I was living in northern Minnesota in the small city of Bemidji at the time, so I took advantage of the Hambidge Center’s proximity to Athens and Milledgeville to go back for another tour of the mansion and spent some time in the University of Georgia’s archives and special collections. I was still gathering material.
In 2012, I accepted a Visiting Assistant Professorship at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I arrived there in mid-August, after a five-day drive from Bemidji. Not long after arriving I was invited to go on a field trip for new faculty to Denali National Park led by the university chancellor. Toward the end of the day, we stopped at the Denali Visitor Center on the way out of the park. After looking around, I asked one of the visitor center employees the question I often ask at visitor centers: what can you tell me about the Black presence here; do you have any books or pamphlets? I was informed that they didn’t have any information on Black folks in the area. The helpful employee also told me that Captain Healy was Black and I should look him up. I did. And poems that feature Captain Michael Augustine Healy and that day and many of my days in Alaska make up the BEFORE & AFTER section of the book. This section is a weave of the research-informed and life-happenings threads. Part of the life that was happening was meeting my now-wife and becoming a father.
In 2013, only a few months after moving to Fairbanks, while reading a bit of science fiction and ruminating on the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War and the approach of August 2019—four hundred years on from August 1619—and falling in love with the place while still feeling the distance, the remoteness of Fairbanks, like I’ve driven to a far-off asteroid, I started to think about the future. Specifically, what if I take 2013 as my pivot year and add 394 (the difference between 1619 and 2013 and the number of years my ancestors, my people, have been subject to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination)? I got 2407, which appealed to me because it reminded me of 24/7, which when I was a young man was a way to say all tha time, and the twenty-fifth century seemed so far off, while in some ways 400 years doesn’t. Once I had a year as a setting, I decided I wanted to try imagining Negroes living way out by the asteroid belt in 2407. After years of ruminating and drafting and revising, picking up and putting down this thread, that work would become the IN THE HOUSE OF THE SUN section of the book.
In 2015, while I was one of the faculty for the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival creative writing workshop, I wrote a poem titled “Jim the Steward” during the session of a fellow faculty member, Don Reardon. As I remember it, Don invited us to write a map a place we knew well, perhaps our childhood home. And after a few years of ruminating, I chose the Governor’s Mansion. This was the first piece I wrote for MANSION SUITE section.
Looking back at my notes to myself about this book, I’d opened myself up to the idea of the book being a hybrid work at least by 2017. I was inspired by other hybrid texts, like Jean Toomer’s Cane, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album. I was also remembering my first creative writing teacher, the Puerto Rican author Judith Ortiz Cofer, who wrote across genres and who used to urge us to approach the subject of our poems in different genres—you’ve written the poem, now try writing the essay, or try writing the story. Judith also set an inspiring example with her book The Latin Deli, a combination of poetry and prose, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It was also in 2017 that the manuscript’s working title shifted from AT THIS FRONTIER to THE NEGROES SEND THEIR LOVE with some amount of certainty.
Early in 2020, I visited Minneapolis to take part in an event for the long-running Literary Witnesses Reading Series held at the Plymouth Congregational Church. The event was hosted by the wonderful Minnesota-based writer and performance artist Hawona Sullivan Janzen. And while in Minneapolis, I stopped in to visit the folks at Milkweed. It’s an understatement to say, I’m fortunate to have a publisher who’s invested in me and my writing. I’m very grateful that Daniel Slager asked me what I had in the works. We had a good conversation, that led to this book that’s coming out in March. In 2021, I had a sixty-five-page manuscript that grew over the next year to 149 pages and to 204 pages the following year, and it wasn’t quite finished. The whole manuscript still needed a lot of work. So, in late 2023, I started working with Broc Rossell, a Milkweed editor, to get the manuscript where I needed it to be. Some parts needed fleshing out. Some pieces needed revising—for instance there was a 10-minute play that found its expression in a different genre. Some pieces and parts needed to be trimmed away. There were a few poems that had been published over the years that I thought would find their home in this book, but they didn’t fit. I needed to get a handle on what the sections would hold and how to order the whole manuscript. I got it down to 175 pages or so when I delivered it to Milkweed on Election Day 2024. But I still worked on it, completing the last piece on Inauguration Day 2025, which happened to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I worked on individual pieces outside of the manuscript, but I would change them in the manuscript as I went along, so there are over 200 versions of the manuscript on my computer.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing often starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
SH: I’m currently ruminating and writing about road trips as a way to explore place, travel, home and history.
