Robert Hill Long was raised and educated in North Carolina. His ancestors had crossed the Atlantic from England, Ireland, Germany in the 17th and 18th century, arriving in Jamestown or Philadelphia, and found their ways down the Great Wagon Road to the counties of Iredell, Alamance, Wake, and Moore, where they became planters, burgesses, government servants, judges, journalists, college presidents, pickle magnates, engineers. One or two ran away with the carnival, or became an ambassador or an evangelist and visionary painter. Like some of these forbears, he applied himself to books and learning, studying literature and music, taking photographs and publishing poems and performing choral music and his own songs throughout high school and college. From his early 20s to his late 50s, he concentrated on writing and publishing poems, prose poems and flash fiction, and had a family with the anthropologist Sandra Morgen. His books include The Power to Die, The Effigies, The Work of the Bow, The Wire Garden, The Kilim Dreaming, and Walking Wounded. He published hundreds of works in journals across North America, and was awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the states of Oregon and North Carolina, and numerous editors and publishers.

In his 59th year, he ended a relationship with alcohol that had gradually become furtive, compulsive, delusional, and quietly dangerous; took leave from what was left of troublesome careerist literary ambitions and dependencies, and was fortunate to find sanctuary with the muse of photography. Since then, he has dedicated eyes and heart and mind and craft to seeing the world as moments of light and shadow, witness and encounter, brevity and eternity. He has exhibited photographs in Oregon, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Ohio, Toronto, New York, Rhode Island, and North Carolina, and circulates fresh work on Instagram as rhl-photographer.

He lives in Winston Salem with his wife Linn Van Meter, a violist and longtime federal law clerk, and their pack of terriers and cats. When he is not photographing their mutual and singular journeys with a camera, he meditates with pencil and pen, with this or that guitar mandolin banjo piano kalimba etcetera: old compositions, new improvisations, inexhaustible springs of melody and harmony and lyric. He admires and cherishes his grown children who live in Los Angeles and Portland, one a distinguished maker of Chardonnay, one a PR professional curating a wonderful and expanding family.

Family is past present future forward in every direction all at once. He looks forward to photographing it every day with every breath. Even today--

Even this writing on today's leaf of backlit silicon--

This aluminum-bodied effigy, self-depleting, dependent on mercenary energy systems, dependent on his voice and fingers--

which falls asleep whenever he turns his back to scan a horizon

and which one day will be jettisoned in the long wake of stars going out by a being with vast responsibilities and conscience and

no attachment to human memory