Ursula Under

About Ingrid Hill

Ingrid Hill has this to say about herself.........

"I was born in New York City, spent my early childhood as a navy-brat gypsy, and then settled in New Orleans until I was grown. I've spent half my adult life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and half in Iowa City, Iowa, both university communities, with a three-year stint in Washington State, on beautiful blue Puget Sound. I have spent some time in Sweden and some time in China. While my writing career was late in starting, I was raising my children and consciously garnering wisdom over this time: I remember in my high school Latin book a watercolored Roman matron named Cornelia saying of her children, in Latin of course, when asked to catalog her wealth and possessions, "THESE are my jewels." I feel the same way. I was left a single mom with eleven children, nine of them then still at home, got a fellowship to do a Ph.D. at Iowa, and came here to study. I remarried during graduate school and had my twelfth child. My maiden name was Hokanson, from my Swedish ship's-captain father; my married name, Hill, which is also my writing name, came from the Finnish "Sellakamaki," meaning "from the back hill," which was truncated to "Maki" and then anglicized to "Hill."

Photograph by Andrew Schmidt.