I took a poetry workshop with Hillary very early in my graduate school career. She was several years ahead of me, and she seemed to know everybody and everything—our classmates, the history of poetry, what poems could mean and how they could work, how her own poetry might matter. But she wore her confidence lightly, and used it generously: she was an incredible listener and reader, quick to ask questions and make you feel welcome. I admired Hillary, and I wish I had known her better. Several years passed before I learned that she was sick, and it surprised me: she’d been wearing that lightly, too. The poems in Harm blew me away. Hillary was a beautiful, ferociously intelligent writer with a beautiful, ferociously intelligent soul. I wish she was still with us.
– Megan Pugh