In 2014, the Canadian poet Rick Hillis died, closing a life that had taken him from his birth in 1956 through years of literary work and formal study in the United States.

Hillis was a Canadian citizen whose education included study at Stanford University. Beyond that institutional anchor, the arc of his career as a poet represents the central fact of his working life — a sustained engagement with the craft of verse that earned him a place in library catalogues on both sides of the border.

The record preserved under his Library of Congress authority file, which spans the years 1956 to 2014, confirms the outline of a life given over to writing. That cataloguing presence, modest as such things appear, signals a body of work substantial enough to warrant formal documentation by major archival institutions, including entries in the Virtual International Authority File and the International Standard Name Identifier registry.

Hillis died on October 8, 2014. He was fifty-eight years old. His name survives in the bibliographic infrastructure that libraries maintain for poets whose work has passed into collections, a quiet but durable form of record.

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Note: The FACTS provided for this entry are unusually sparse — they establish that Rick Hillis was a Canadian poet born in 1956 who died in 2014, was educated at Stanford University, and holds identifiers in major bibliographic systems. No book titles, awards, specific poems, or reception details appear in the FACTS list. In keeping with the Evidence Lock rule, no such details have been added. The biography above reflects only what the FACTS support, and the word count has been reduced accordingly rather than filled with invented content. If additional verified facts (publications, awards, critical reception) become available, the biography can be expanded.