Rick Hillis

Rick Hillis is a Canadian poet, and short story writer.

He graduated from the University of Saskatchewan and the Iowa Writers Workshop, with an MFA. He attended Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in fiction writing, and has been a Chesterfield Film Writers’ Fellow at Universal Studios.

He has taught creative writing at a number of institutions, including Reed College, Stanford University, Lewis & Clark College, and the University of Oregon. He has been on faculty at the University of Iowa’s Summer Writers’ Festival. He began teaching at DePauw University in 2002.

• 1990 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, for Limbo River
• Gerald Lampert Award finalist

Short Stories

• Limbo River. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1990. ISBN 978-0-8229-3653-4. 

Poetry

• The Blue Machines of Night. Coteau Books. 1988. ISBN 978-0-919926-76-9. 

Rick Hillis died on October 7, 2014.

Raymond Carver territory has an outpost in Saskatchewan, Canada, and that's where Rick Hillis sets the nine stories in this collection, which won the 1990 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Blue-collar workers and bums, alcoholics and artists, farm hands and nursing-home attendants, teachers and children struggle through a world where winters are long, money is short and dreams tend to come true only in dreams.