Sierra Poetry Festival is a project of Nevada County Arts & Culture. This year’s main stage event will take place on April 18, 2026, at The Center for the Arts, in Grass Valley, CA, attended by some of our most exciting local, national, and international poets and performers.
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Robert Hass—poet, critic, and teacher—is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics until his retirement in 2019.
Brenda Hillman is the author of eleven books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). A twelfth collection, Still House in the Desert, is forthcoming in fall 2026. Her first collection of prose, Three Talks, was published in 2023. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, Hillman’s recent awards include the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN (Oakland) in 2025. Hillman is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and currently directs the Poetry Program at Community of Writers.