Hilda Morley (1916–1998)

Hilda Morley, née Auerbach, was born in New York City to Russian Jewish émigré parents. She was a cousin of Isaiah Berlin on her father's side. She began writing poetry as a child and and learned Hebrew, French, Italian, and Latin. At age 15, she moved to Haifa in the British Mandate of Palestine with her mother. She studied at the University of London and met the poet HD. At the outbreak of World War II, she returned to the USA and worked for the Committee to Aid Jewish Refugees. In 1945, she married Eugene Morley, a painter. Through him, she became friends with other painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning. In 1952, after a divorce from Morley, she married Stefan Wolpe, a German composer and fellow teacher at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. There she became friends with John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. She traveled widely in Europe with her husband's work. At age 60, in 1976, she published her first collection of poems, A Blessing Outside Us. Other collected works include What Are Winds and What Are Waters (1983); To Hold in My Hand: Selected Poems 1955-1983 (1983); Cloudless at First (1988) and The Turning (1998). Besides Black Mountain, she also taught at New York University and Rutgers University, among others; served as resident poet at Northeast Missouri University; and taught English literature at private schools in New York and the UK.