The Creative Writing Program presents a gathering that will serve as both a memorial for Hillary Gravendyk and a reading for her posthumously published book of poems, The Soluble Hour, a new Pocket Series edition from Omnidawn. In her poems, Gravendyk speaks with visionary passion about how the beloved and dear ones will soon be without her and laments for their imminent grief. But Gravendyk nevertheless pulls the voice towards testimony of unquestioned love, a recollection of landscapes Californian and interior. Readers of The Soluble Hour will include Julia Bloch, Jason Zuzga, and Cynthia Arrieu-King.
HILLARY GRAVENDYK (1979–2014) was born in Los Angeles, California. She attended Tulane and the University of Washington and went on to get a doctorate in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, her chapbook The Naturalistcame out from Achiote Press and in 2010, her book Harm was published by Omnidawn. In 2009, she was hired to teach twentieth-century poetry at Pomona College in Claremont, California. After moving to Oakland in 2003 with her husband Benjamin Burrill, Hillary lived out most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area and Claremont.