From 2001 to 2005, he was a Visiting Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Michigan, where he taught poetry courses in literature and creative writing.
Since 2005, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in literature and creative writing (poetry) as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University.
[5] If Brother Salvage were Rick Hilles’, say, third collection, not his first as it is; if the versatility and dynamism of voice in these poems signaled a poet’s maturation from the safer outings of his youth; if we could’ve foreseen this kind of command of histories and their peculiar narrators, the book would merely astonish.
[6]Rick Hilles's first collection, is constructed upon an ambitious intellectual edifice that both grounds and ties together the disparate personal and historical materials of the poems.
The books central metaphor is that of the genizah, a Hebrew word for "hiding place," which an epigraph to the title poem explains is "a depository where old and/or worn-out secular, holy & heretical books are kept inviolate ... Genizot serve the twin purpose of protecting what they contain and preventing their more dangerous contents from causing harm.