Hilary Vaughn Dobel was born in the Pacific Northwest and lives in Massachusetts, where she is a clinical social worker and outpatient psychotherapist. 

Also a poet and Spanish-to-English translator, Hilary holds degrees from Princeton University and University of Chicago, and she has been invited to lecture at Princeton and at Wellesley College. She has received fellowships from the St. Botolph Club Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Her first book, The Messerschmidt Poems, was published with Platypus Press in 2021.

online

Two Poems, The Raleigh Review vol 9.1, Spring 2019

Aubade, wildness issue 15, August 2018

Calotype, TriQuarterly issue 152, July 2017

Chatroulette, Gulf Coast Online Exclusive, July 2016

Four Poems, Blunderbuss, June 2015

Kids These Days, Boston Review, April 2015, National Poetry Month Poem-a-Day 2015

It’s Not Science, But It’s About to Be, Sixth Finch, Fall 2014

Two Poems, The Cortland Review, February 2014

On the Distance of the Painter’s Arm, Kenyon Review Online, Spring 2013

Metaphor for Something, Guernica, Spring 2012
 

on paper

Involuntary Memory, Prairie Schooner, Summer 2019

Athlete, Colorado Review, Summer 2017

Annual, A Public Space, Winter 2013-2014

Rugby for Lovers, Cimarron Review, Fall 2013

Epistle, Mid-American Review, Spring 2013

Two Poems, Ploughshares, Winter 2012-2013

Messerschmidt Poems, Seattle Review, Fall 2012

Reviews AND ESSAYS

Jay Deshpande, Love the Stranger (YesYes Books, 2015).  Reviewed for Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2018. 

Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (LSU Press, 2013). Reviewed for Parnassus: Poetry in Review, June 2014.

what is a rose? we wondered, yosie crespo

from artepoética press. 

The clouds, juan josé saer

from Open Letter Books

One of NPR‘s 5 Best Books in Translation for 2016: “The Clouds is a poem to be savored.”

Publisher’s Weekly: “In this wonderful, gleeful novel from Argentinian author Saer…”

Paste: 21 of the Best New Translated Novels

Publisher’s Weekly: 10 Essential Spanish-Language Books

Wall Street Journal: “[I]t’s a wild, vividly imagined travelogue on its own terms...”

World Literature Today‘s Summer Reads 2016: “For a tragicomic trip in Proustian style.”

Literary Hub’s 16 Books You Should Read This May: “All this and more makes each new Saer novel in translation a treat and a triumph.”

Rain Taxi: "In Hilary Vaughn Dobel's excellent English version of the text, Juan José Saer visits us from an era that is like and unlike our own..."

nine coins, carlos pintado

winner of the National Poetry Series’ 2014 Paz Prize for Poetry, from Akashic Press. 

One of World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations for 2015

“The Moon” selected by US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey for publication in the New York Times

This poem, translated from the original Spanish, unfolds as a litany of the many ways the moon has been described. One long, complex sentence links all the previous iterations, while a second, much shorter sentence isolates the image of yet another moon. The prose-poem form seems to contain the patch of night sky from which that new apprehension—the moon reflected in the vision of a solitary witness, the poem’s speaker—arrives.