Memoir
In Defiance of All True Things
A memoir tracing three generations of fatherhood, identity, faith, and inheritance, from a Brooklyn studio apartment to the questions a son carries into his own life as a father.
About the memoirShamar
Hill
Poems and prose about inheritance, faith, and the families that make us, written where Black and Jewish history, the blues and the psalms, run into each other.
Work in progress
All writingPoetry
Photographs of an Imagined Childhood
A collection that includes the turnaround, a form of his own that sets the biblical psalms beside early blues recordings and lets each answer the other.
About the poemsNext up
Sun, Nov 15, 2026 · Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York
Writing Grief That Isn't Yours Alone: Communal Loss in Jewish Memory
New York Jewish Book Festival. With André Aciman and Tikva Hecht, moderated by Ruth Franklin.
About
Shamar Hill is a writer whose work moves across poetry, memoir, and the essay. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, Tinderbox, and Washington Square Review. He is the founder of Machshavah, a salon series on Jewish life and ideas.
Full bioNews, now and then
A short note when there are new poems, essays, or events. Rarely, and never more than that.