About
Raymond P. Hammond is the editor-in-chief of both The New York Quarterly and NYQ Books. He holds an MA in American Poetry from NYU’s Gallatin School and is the author of Poetic Amusement, a book of literary criticism. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife, the poet Amanda J. Bradley, and their dog Hank.
Our Town Downtown Article from 2006
Roanoke College Magazine — Alumni Profile
Network Magazine Profile — Just After 9/11
My Tree — this is where I began writing. This tree was just beyond my parents’ property at the very top of the hill on the other side of the gully from the house. It had been spared removal for the road cut below just a few feet away and now stood a precarious eighty plus feet above Trinity Road below. I would climb the tree and sit in the arm of the lowest branch perched where I could just see over the nearby scraggly little trees, see the Appalachian mountains in the far west horizon, Interstate 81 running north and south at my feet, and farm pastures carpeted over rolling hills in the between. I would sit there for hours on end, far from the house–an entire gully and world away. I would wonder about the people in the cars, where were they coming from, going to, what they were hauling, where home was–what put them across my path at that very moment in time. The concentration of these questions in my mind coupled with the drone of the traffic always led me into a contemplative state and words would pour out of my mind sometimes making it onto paper and sometimes not. It didn’t matter, for those moments my mind was free and going 80 miles an hour down the interstate to everywhere.
