DaMaris B. Hill

DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar from Charleston, West Virginia. She is professor of creative writing, English, and African American studies at the University of Kentucky. 

Hill’s literary works include Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland (Lexington Books, 2016), and \Vi-zə-bəl\ \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures) (Mammoth Publications, 2015), among others. She’s also an author of digital poetry, including the poem “Shut Up In My Bones.” 

For the 2023 to 2024 academic year, Hill was selected as a fellow for Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Hill has received numerous awards and honors, including a 2023 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow with the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, a 2020–2021 Igniting Research Collaborations Grant from the University of Kentucky, a 2018 Girls of Color: Voice and Vision Grant with Kentucky Foundation for Women, a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a 2012–2015 The Watering Hole Poetry Fellowship, and a 2003 Award for College Writers from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. 

Hill’s primary areas of focus include Black feminism and the study of intersectional identities, along with an interest in digital cultures, remix theories, historical archives, and public narratives. Her writing is significantly influenced by the works of Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, and Deborah Willis, particularly their theories on critical fabulation, rememory, and the visual representation of the Black body.