Lauren Russell

Lauren Russell

Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). A 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and residencies from the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and City of Asylum/Passa Porta. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Cream City Review, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She has been assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh for the last four years. Beginning in the fall of 2020, she will join the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the Center for Poetry there.

2 Articles Published | Follow:
Are We Not Obsidian?*

for Bekezela Mguni and Saretta Morgan *title after Ellen Gallagher’s exhibit Are We Obsidian? This…

Unraveling the Grand Cliché: Yona Harvey’s Hemming the Water

When I was a teenager in Los Angeles, I nearly worshipped Frida Kahlo. My mom…