Summer 2026 | Sean Hill | Vol. 10, Iss. 1
Lauren K. Alleyne, Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center
Tyler Richards, Video Production Supervisor | Riley M. Hollars, Graduate Editorial Assistant
Alli Donnelly and Stephen Lunde, Student Videographers
Welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle, a publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Each issue gives you a 360-degree view of a Black poet, including an interview, new poems, a critical essay, and a writing prompt inspired by our featured poet.
Sean Hill is the author of the multi-genre collection, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures (Milkweed Editions, 2026), and two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014), and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008). Hill has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in renowned journals including Callaloo, New England Review, Orion, and Poetry, and in nearly three dozen anthologies. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.
- Interview: Sean Hill speaks with Gbenga Adesina about the places, beings, and voices that shape his work.
- Critical Essay: Wesley Rothman considers Sean Hill’s work and its explorations of different perspectives of and within history.
- Poems: Read “For Us,” “How a Father Should Talk with His Son,” and “They Shower Us with Kisses or Bullets Depending” by Sean Hill
- Writing Prompt: Explore revision at the intersection of ecology and place– what do these twinned histories tell?
Read transcription here.
Cover Design by Robert Mott
Cover Photo: Bob Adamek
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.