Below is a link to a recording of Ernest Hilbert’s reading at Fergie’s Pub, Sunday, September 28th, 2025 (with Camille Ralphs). He reads “On Leaving an Old Mirror Out at the Curb” from his 2015 book Caligulan; “Barred Island” from the magazine Subtropics; “Blackthorn” from the Fortnightly Review; and “Remains” and “Sole Quiet Thing,” both from his 2023 book Storm Swimmer.

About

Ernest Hilbert is a poet, librettist, critic, and rare book dealer resident in Philadelphia. His debut poetry collection Sixty Sonnets (2009) was described by X. J. Kennedy as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.” His second collection, All of You on the Good Earth (2013), has been hailed as a “wonder of a book,” “original and essential,” an example of “sheer mastery of poetic form,” containing “some of the most elegant poems in American literature since the loss of Anthony Hecht.” His third collection, Caligulan (2015), has been called “brutal yet beautiful,” defined by “pleasure, clarity, and discipline,” “tough-minded and precise,” filled with a “stern, witty, and often poignant music,” “a page-turner in a way most poetry books can never be,” and “an honest book for dishonest times.” Caligulan was selected as the winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize. His fourth collection, Last One Out (2019), has been described as “a book haunted by loss,” “elegant and athletic, eloquent and brave, deeply thought and felt,” “human and moving.” Ilya Kaminsky declared that “Last One Out is a very beautiful book . . . it sings.” A. E. Stallings wrote of the book that “a certain amount of youthful edge and swagger has been worn away, but is replaced by mastery, depth, and mellowed sweetness.” His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and appeared in 2023. Phillips described the book as “a gleaming cornucopia of dreams, nightmares, tenderness, and grace . . . a rare book, both willing and able to capture the wide and relentless range of the human condition in its varying lights and shadows, and in settings spanning the mundane, the tawdry, and the sublime.” The Hudson Review declared it “a book of excellent poems,” naming Hilbert “one of his generation’s most interesting poets.” The Washington Post Book Club described it as a book of “harrowing action” in which the “undeniable delicacy of human life [is] set against the beautiful chaos of nature.”

Hilbert’s poems have appeared in Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, Verse, The New Criterion, Seneca Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, Oxonian Review, and the London Review, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2018), the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2011), The Incredible Sestina Anthology (2013), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). Hilbert has written about books for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator, Fine Books & Collections, and The Hopkins Review. He has published essays about breaking a rib in a mosh pit during a Slayer concert, the bizarre history of literary relic hunters, the troubled legacy of Robert Lowell’s late-career sonnets, and the golden age of the American video game arcade. In 2023, Hilbert served as North American campaign manager for A. E. Stallings’ successful campaign for the appointment of Oxford Professor of Poetry. Hilbert was awarded the 2023 Meringoff Writing Award from the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and accepted the award at the annual conference at the University of Houston. In the fall of 2023, Hilbert was poet in residence at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. His poems have been translated into Danish, Norwegian, Spanish, and Czech.

Hilbert writes opera libretti and lyrics for composers Stella Sung, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Christopher LaRosa. He has collaborated on scripts for films and live concerts staged by the post-punk conceptual band Mercury Radio Theater (he has also appeared live with them). Hilbert recorded a spoken-word album and performed live with the band Legendary Misbehavior. He performed his poems at an interlude during performances of Bach cantatas by The Trinity Choir and Baroque Orchestra conducted by Julian Wachner at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City. Ernest Hilbert’s poem “Riddle Me,” written specifically for use as NFT (non-fungible token) art, was listed for sale using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin through OpenSea, a peer-to-peer marketplace for rare digital items and crypto collectibles housed at the Hunter College MFA program in New York City; it was purchased by a private collector. Hilbert has written that although the poem “cannot lay claim to being the first poem (or item described as a poem) issued on the crypto market as an NFT, it is the first to use meter, rhyme, and repetition, which are ancient techniques essential to many uses of the art form throughout history.” Hilbert currently keeps a heavily-encrypted dark web poetry site called Cocytus and a more public website to promote his own events and publications called E-Verse Radio. In the late 1980s and early 90s, Hilbert played bass and wrote songs for the thrash metal band Judgement. The band received a remastered deluxe reissue of their studio and live recordings in 2023 titled The Final Decree from Thrashback Records.

Hilbert graduated with a doctorate in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. While there, he studied with Jon Stallworthy—biographer of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice and editor of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry—and James Fenton, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Hilbert later served as poetry editor of Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City and editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, published by the American Poetry Fund in Washington DC. In 2003, he hosted an evening of readings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, entitled “The Future Knows Everything: New American Writing.” He has been interviewed on NPR and NPR-affiliate stations, as well as Sirius XM Radio, and the Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry Off the Shelf” podcast, and his poetry has been read on WPSU/ PBS’s Poetry Moment series.

For over a decade and a half, Hilbert hosted the E-Verse Equinox Reading Series, which he founded, at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia. Over that time, he shared duties with co-hosts Paul Siegel, John Wall Barger, Spencer Short, and Luke Stromberg. Featured readers during the series run included Chad Abushanab, Sarah Arvio, Laynie Browne, George David Clark, Eduardo C. Corral, Gregory Crosby, Thomas Devaney, Michael Dickman, Timothy Donnelly, Jehanne Dubrow, Daisy Fried, Warren C. Longmire, Jennifer McCreary, Paul Muldoon, Kathleen Ossip, Iain Haley Pollock, Camille Ralphs, Catie Rosemurgy, Alexis Sears, Vijay Seshadri, Robyn Schiff, A. E. Stallings, Afaa Weaver, David Yezzi, and Matthew Zapruder.

He works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, Keeper of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and their son, Ian.