I am a poet and dance critic. Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books 2018) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle 2019 John Leonard Award for Best First Book. My poetry has been adapted for a play, "The Old In and Out," produced in NYC in 2009 and 2013. In 2017, I collaborated with poet Julie Bruck to edit a posthumous collection of work by Jane Underwood, founder of The Writing Salon in San Francisco: When My Heart Goes Dark, I Turn the Porchlight On (Blue Light Press, 2017). Recent work appears in Rust+Moth, New Ohio Review, Lily Poetry Review, Swannanoa Review, Grist, SWWIM, Mom Egg Review, LEON, Scoundrel Time, Anti-Heroin Chic, South Florida Poetry Journal, No Dear, Poetry Bay, Quarter After Eight, Trailer Park Quarterly, Maintenant, Braving the Body, and Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest. I've been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for the 2017 Disquiet Literary Prize and my prose poem, "To the Rescue" took third place in the Quarter After Eight Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest. Based in NYC, I've worked as a magazine writer and editor for 25 years, most recently as editor in chief of Dance Teacher magazine. I was editorial director for Dance Magazine for 20 years. In 2020, I received the Dance Teacher Award. My writing on dance appears frequently in The Brooklyn Rail and Fjord Review. I hold an MFA from the Program for Writers of Warren Wilson College.
“'We take our pleasure as we can,' Karen Hildebrand writes in the title poem to Crossing Pleasure Avenue, in a voice filled with desire tempered by loss. And there is much pleasure in this book of terse lyrics that engages the reader with humor, brio, and bite, in poems about everything from the 60’s TV show Leave It to Beaver with a crossdressing Beev, to imagining a year without men, to envisioning widows hijacking the C train. In these wildly imaginative poems, Karen Hildebrand sings the aging woman’s body electric!" —SHARON DOLIN
"Karen Hildebrand’s poetry is like sociology—if sociology could be felt by the hairs on one’s neck and seen in fragrant, Fauvist Technicolor. Her brilliant debut full-length collection, Crossing Pleasure Avenue, reminds us of the strangeness of the everyday and the pleasure in those ripe moments when the past and the present buckle and overlap." —JOANNA FUHRMAN
"Only Karen Hildebrand could write an ode to toilets of the world called “Dear John”; “A History of Feminism” that includes a bucket list; “The Sixties, Explained” via beloved TV shows; “Ode to My Bunion”; and “The Day the Widows Hijack the C Train.” From “moonshine ranch wives” to Emily Dickinson and her fruitcake to a “Femme Fatale,” Hildebrand honors the women who have come before and the women who we are. She is funny, fervent, and fierce. Crossing Pleasure Avenue is delightfully profound. I’d take a walk with her poetry any day!" —DENISE DUHAMEL
