Parker is a final year PhD student at Trinity’s School of English and an early career research fellow at the Trinity Long room Hub. A poet and essayist, Parker recently received news that their first poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, had been shortlisted for the 2024 T.S Eliot Prize.
“I think I just have moved into feeling so grateful and excited and almost a sense of relief because I think writing is a career that’s hard to make it in…or to keep funding or justifying. But this feels like this vote of confidence that means I’m going to have access to the resources and communities that will make it that much more possible for me to continue a writing career.”
Originally from New Mexico, Parker received financial aid to attend Stanford University and although they started out as a Maths major, they quickly found their way to writing and more specifically to poetry. This was not a transition that was easily understood by family and friends. Speaking to the University Times earlier this year, they commented: “I had it in my head that it wasn’t the kind of major that a person like me would or could do. As a scholarship student of colour, I felt that everyone else in a similar position was doing a STEM major and I had gotten the advice so much as an undergrad that ‘you’ve been given the golden ticket at Stanford so make it count’ or hearing that switching to English was a waste, that I wasn’t utilising the potential gift I’d gotten. Also, the whole diversity thing, the way it was framed was like ‘Black People in STEM! We want you and your body in STEM, we want to champion it there but everywhere else, not so much.’”
A big part of Parker’s collection deals with High Jump, a sport which they practised “obsessively” as a teenager. While many people wouldn’t easily join the dots between a track and field sport like High Jump and poetry, Parker says for them it was a meeting of “creative disciplines”.
“I related to poetry in much the same way, in that there was almost sort of innate knowledge that I was tapping into of how language should sound and look like and move. I think I wanted to use that to go back and think about what High Jump was to me, what it meant to me during those years…”, they said.
There are several poems within the debut collection that deal with High Jump including ‘High Jump as Flow State’ and ‘High Jump as Divination’. Describing it as akin to “flying”, Parker said “as a black and queer body I was thought not to trust my body and its instincts and that it was something to be controlled or tamed and when I was high jumping, trusting my body was the only thing.”
This expansive collection puts figures from the world of High Jump next to those from Greek mythology and Shakespeare. It deals with many of Parker’s own preoccupations and influences, including some unexpected explorations of pop culture (references to the hit TV show Fleabag, the movie Ice Princess and singer songwriters). A fan of Joni Mitchell, Parker uses two poems in the collection to address the singer’s blackface controversy and to explore perceptions of black masculinity. Both historic and present US race relations are to the fore in poems ‘Diversity Statement (500 words)’, ‘In which I attend my own lynching’ and ‘Other People’s Fear Keeps Me Up at Night’ which they read on a recent episode of RTE’s Poetry People.
For this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist review, John Field wrote: “In High Jump as Icarus Story, Hibbett achieves a work of extraordinary breadth and power. It’s celebratory poetry which pulses with life and wears its scholarship lightly. Yet, at the same time, Hibbett pulls no punches as they hold their mirror to the world.”
The winner of the 2024 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on Monday 13 January 2025, where the winner and the shortlisted poets will be presented with their cheques. The winner will receive a cheque for £25,000.