Milkweed Presents Sean Hill

Join Milkweed as we present Sean Hill in conversation with Michael Kleber-Diggs. Sean will read from his new collection, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspective, and Possible Futures. There will be an audience Q+A and book signing to follow.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.”

This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart.

Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods, a Minnesota Book Award-winner, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and the Harvard Review, and several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, and Villanelles. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Hill has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, he received an MFA from the University of Houston. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. He is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

Michael Kleber-Diggs is the author of Worldly Things, which was awarded the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Michael teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.