Oh, What a Fellow She Is!

For Hilda Raz, in honor of her retirement from PS

My first encounter with Hilda Raz was when I had some translations from Serbian accepted by her for the Prairie Schooner in 1990, before I was accepted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for my PhD. One of my main reasons for choosing UNL was that this prestigious magazine was there and she was its editor.

I came to Lincoln in July of 1991 after being accepted to the PhD program. I was to pursue one of the then-rare PhDs with a creative writing dissertation (only some eleven schools offered that back then). I was Serbian from Yugoslavia writing in English, my second language. I had started to work with Marcia Southwick as my dissertation adviser, but then she decided to get married and leave unl. After that I became Hilda Raz's first PhD advisee. Hilda was the one who edited the language, grammar, and, of course, my punctuation. She knew which poems could be in the thesis and which could not, right away. We would sit in her office for a long time, discussing what to include and what not to include, and she helped me put my poems in some kind of order in the dissertation (which I now teach my students to do with their theses). Something I had in common with Hilda was that she, like my mother, about whom I was writing, had breast cancer. She could empathize with what I was going through.

Besides this, Hilda helped me design one of my comprehensive exams in order to have it approved. I wanted to spend more time reading American poetry, as I had come from studying in Europe and India, where British poetry was more prevalent. So, I put together a list of forty contemporary American poets and read five books from each along with criticism. I realized that Hilda is someone who has always been interested in presenting diversity in the journal and that's what makes it so special, and she insisted that I include many diverse writers and many feminist writers on my list. Perhaps I was resisting her choices somewhat, but in the end I listened to her advice and learned from all that I read. One never knows what one will do after graduate school. I ended up teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, a historically black Catholic university, where I have recently become full professor. For what Hilda made me do I am forever grateful. Those forty poets have remained some of my favorite poets.

I graduated from UNL in 1995 after defending my dissertation and drinking champagne and eating strawberries with my mentors. Since then Hilda has written recommendation letters for me for jobs and a blurb for my first book, my dissertation, Frozen Embraces, which was published in 1997. She introduced me to so many writers and editors. Hilda also accepted my own poems for Prairie Schooner on several occasions. My husband, the poet John Gery, and I came to Lincoln to celebrate eighty years of the Schooner, and we have kept in touch by visiting at the AWP conference. Then I wrote an NEA grant for a reading series at Xavier and invited Hilda as one of the eight writers to come read and talk about being an editor. It was wonderful to have her see me with my own students and what I was doing with them. I also translated five of her poems into Serbian for a bilingual anthology I edited and translated, titled Fives, published in Serbia in 2002.

But how can I ever thank her for what she has done for me? Who can believe that twenty years have passed since I first came to know Hilda? I am sorry to see her retiring from her position, but I hope that she will continue to write and publish, and that the new editor will continue to publish as many diverse voices as Hilda has and thus follow in her footsteps. It will not be an easy job. Hilda is a tough act to follow...