A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.
-Anne Sexton, from "The Black Art"
As far as academic interests and goals, Hilarie hopes to be a professor rooted in an English Department, while also teaching cross-listed civil rights classes in the law school. She intends to draw connections between progressive legal movements (especially Constitutional Law issues impacting women) and progressive literary movements (especially feminism and American women poets).
Hilarie's academic dream is to teach several different classes, each of which she has fairly detailed fantasies about. One fantasy is to teach Constitutional Law, with a literary, language-based, historical slant. She'd also like to teach a course on feminist theory or feminist jurisprudence. In the non-cross-listed, purely literary arena, she wants to teach a course on contemporary American women poets or American feminist utopias and distopias.
Hilarie also owns a business called "The Enchanted Cabin" that sells gemstone jewelry (some made by Hilarie), rocks and minerals, candles, scarves, incense, and other spiritual decor.
Hilarie is obsessed with world travel. She has studied abroad four times, studying tropical ecology in Costa Rica as a pre-college program, studying Anglo-Irish literature in Cork, Ireland for a semester in college, studying cultural anthropology for a summer in Ghana, and then studying international human rights and comparative constitutional law in India for a summer during law school.
She currently teaches a freshman writing course called "Poetry of Womanhood," where her students become enmeshed in Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Joy Harjo, and other American women poets that write about controversial, activist, or taboo subjects. Her students from last semester recently started making video recordings of themselves reading poems that they read for the class, and posting the videos on Hilarie's facebook wall. They did one great three-voice rendition of Marge Piercy's poem, "The Friend." Since then, Hilarie has recorded herself reading some of the poems from the class and uploaded them to her facebook profile. Hilarie is passionate about teaching feminist theory and poetry written by women, and adores her students immensely.
Hilarie is good at strategy games, being funny, acting silly, making jewelry, picking out the best of something, Scrabble, ordering from complicated menus, inventing things, connecting with cats, reading, typing fast, arguing a point, turning lemons into spiked lemonade, stirring up a discussion, comforting friends, cooking, and playing nintendo.
