Mount Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Hillard draws on decades of fascination and travel to Cuba in his newly published poetry collection, featuring artwork by MSJ alumna Kayla Hess ’24.
As long as he can remember, Jeffrey Hillard has been fascinated with the island country of Cuba in the Caribbean. Recently retired, he has transformed his love for the island into a book of poems called “Havana Riffs: Poems on Cuba,” published by Dos Madres Press.
“My love of Cuba dates back to when I was around seven, when my parents would take my sister and me on vacation to southern Florida. Every year we would stop in Hialeah, Fla., a suburb of Miami, to see Great Aunt Marta and my Uncle Harold Bibb,” he remembers. “He and Marta met and married in Cuba, where he was stationed in the Navy.”
“My desire to write about Cuba percolated in 1993 with my first of three lengthy trips to the island,” says the Emeritus Professor of English in the Department of Liberal Arts.
A Mount alum, Kayla Hess ’24, contributed hand-drawn art to the collection, created “digitally through an app called Procreate, using an iPad and Apple Pen.”
Each one is based on a specific poem in the book. In her words, the drawings are “intricate, thought-provoking and whimsical.” At the Mount, she majored in graphic design with a minor in creative writing.
In a forward to the poems, writer Lynn Hugo recalls that in late spring, 1995, she and Hillard were among a group of eight writers “who were allowed into the country on journalist visas. The Cubans were so kind to us. Smiling, open, welcoming.”
She notes “the astonishing empathy” in Hillard’s poems. “He sees into the Cuban soul, their yearning for life, for connection, for relief.”
Fellow Mount poet Dr. Elizabeth Taryn Mason describes “Havana Riffs” as “the sensation of hunger. It is ever-present in the voices that Hillard takes on, in the stories he captures, where dogs and birds are as ravenous as the people, and the people hunger not just literally but also for more education, for privacy, for certainty.”