Hilda Conkling was born in 1910, supposedly at Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, as that”s where her mother, Grace Hazard Conkling, was working around that time as a teacher at Smith College.

Her father died when Hilda was very young, she was four years old. She had an older sister, Elsa.

Hilda Conkling was a child poet, and that”s why she”s remembered. It”s really astonishing how she wrote most of her poetry between the ages of four and ten years old.

Her mother Grace was her biggest influence. She used to read to her daughters all kinds of literature, no matter how hard it was. As a result, Hilda began speaking poems, which her mother would wrote down and broke into poetic lines.

Her first published book appeared in 1920, “Poems by a Little Girl”, when she was only ten. The preface was written by Amy Lowell. Two years later, she published “Shoes of the Wind” and, finally, “Silverhorn” in 1924. These were the only books she wrote, as she mysteriously stopped writing when she became a teenager.