Dr. DaMaris B. Hill has been writing since she was a child, growing up around books and hearing stories. She just didn’t tell anyone about it. Instead, she stuffed her work underneath her mattress and bed, hiding them from others.
Dr. DaMaris B. HillCourtesy: Beowulf Sheehan
Hill – currently a full professor of creative writing, English, and African American studies at the University of Kentucky (UK) – wrote her first story while pursuing her master’s degree in English in the early 2000s. On the Other Side of Heaven – 1957, a fiction piece, received recognition and praise and was later reprinted in the journal Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, in 2011.
“The prose was in English, and the dialogue was in Spanish. And apparently, I didn't know that that was innovative,” Hill says. “It just made sense to me. . . People speak Spanish in this setting."
Her scholarly interests encompass topics surrounding the experience of Black women, such as the erasure of contributions, identity in digital spaces, cultural and collective memory, and mass incarceration.
“I’m very concerned about the ways that the contributions of Black women are erased or understated in the texture and fabric of national narratives but also geopolitical concepts of power,” Hill told Diverse. “I am interested in the way that we preserve, memorialize, and remember the experiences of Black women. But I'm also interested in the ways that Black women's contributions are purposefully and systematically erased from the archival and digital environments."
In her 2019 poetry collection, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland, Hill expresses her concerns about Black women in confinement. For her groundbreaking work, she earned a nomination for an NAACP Image Award as well as several other commendations. And the very existence of her book itself made her the first American poet and second poet ever to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing house.
