H. L. HIX
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BIOGRAPHY
H. L. HIX was born in Oklahoma and raised in various small towns in the south. After earning his B.A. from Belmont College (now Belmont University) and his Ph.D. (in philosophy) from the University of Texas, Hix taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and was an administrator at the Cleveland Institute of Art, before joining the faculty of the University of Wyoming, where, after a term as director of the creative writing MFA, he now teaches. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai University and the University of Texas, been the “Distinguished Visitor” at the NEO MFA, and taught in the low-residency MFA at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
His more consequential character flaws and personal shortcomings are best kept to himself, but the long list of his trivial failures includes running (he used to run 10K races years ago, but now intends to run much more often than he actually does), gardening (though pocket gophers and the long winters at altitude combine to limit his success), and classical guitar (he took lessons from good teachers for several years, but gave up in despair and now, quite literally, cannot play a song). The truth is that he’d rather sit in front of the fireplace with a good book than do any of those things. He does like to watch a gloomy Scandinavian film periodically, to avoid being overtaken by optimism and insouciance, and is not proud of how much time he wastes keeping up with that wholly corrupt enterprise, college football. Oh, and if it’s after dinner, he considers a modest nip of good scotch a fine complement to the whole fireplace-and-good-book experience.
His poetry, essays, and other works have been published in McSweeney’s, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Poetry, and other journals, been recognized with an NEA Fellowship, the Grolier Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Peregrine Smith Award, and been translated into Spanish, Russian, Urdu, and other languages.
He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with his partner, the poet Kate Northrop.