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Department of English & Language Arts


The Administrative Team

Dr. DaMaris Hill

Dr. DaMaris Hill

DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar.  Her most recent book, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, is deemed “urgent” and “luminous” in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review. Hill’s first poetry collection, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, is a powerful narrative-in-verse that bears witness to Black women burdened by incarceration. It was an Amazon #1 Best Seller in African American Poetry, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title, and 2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Hill’s other books include The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, and \Vi-zə-bəl\   \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures).  Her digital work, “Shut Up In My Bones, is a twenty-first century poem that uses remix/pastiche/intertextuality to honor a specific cultural past, while working to construct visions of a better future.  

Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. Her fellowships include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and a fellowship with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Hill is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at the Morgan State University.

Education:

Doctor of Philosophy: University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS (2012), English - Creative Writing
Graduate Certification: University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS (2011), Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Master of Arts: Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD (2005), English
Bachelor of Arts: Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD (1999), English. and Psychology