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“I am astonished by Lillian Yvonne Bertram’s trailblazing poetry in Travesty Generator. Bertram uses open-source coding to generate haunting inquiring elegies to Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner, and Emmett Till. By framing her “counter-narratives” of black lives in code and social media optimization, Bertram brilliantly conveys how black experience becomes codified, homogenized, and branded for capitalist dissemination. Code, written by white men, is part of the hardwired system of white supremacy, where structural violence begets itself. But Bertram hacks into it. She re-engineers language by synthesizing the lyric and coding script, taking the baton from Harryette Mullen and the Oulipians and dashing with it to late 21st century black futurity. Travesty Generatoris genius.”

— Cathy Park Hong

“Personal Science, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s third collection of poetry, takes us into the world we are already living in: the fear of planes and weather is real, the complications with brothers and lovers is real, the Internet searches are real, as are the discoveries and doubts and imaginative facts that come with their results. . . . With resolute doubleness, Bertram’s verses insist on the mutual influences between the world of the mind and the world outside; these lines move fluidly, flagging uncertainty but not dismissing it.”

— Boston Review

“Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is an offering to those of us for whom normalcy is the constant shift between a sense of location and dislocation. The shrewdness of these poems accumulates into a critique of our American desires and failures. The precision of Bertram’s lyrical and agile language is born out of the specificity of her gaze on what subliminally feels like a road trip through the towns that make up this country. These unforgettable poems awaken images so masterfully that reading and seeing become one thing: ‘We are claimed by middle country/where the river is cooked to steam in the factory belly/& every quivering shadow is missing its father.’ This award winning collection is an American portrait in which the poems are themselves, in Bertram’s words, ‘the elliptical mystery or the grief that walks different on everyone…’ It’s exhilarating to read poetry that pushes reading into the realm of experience.”

— Claudia Rankine

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s most recent book of poetry is Negative Money (Soft Skull Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the New England Book Award. Their previous book, Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), won the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work, was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Their other books include Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. Bertram’s other publications include the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books, 2012), winner of the Phantom Books chapbook award; the artist book Grand Dessein (commissioned by Container Press), a mixed media artifact that meditates on the work and writing of the artist Paul Klee and was acquired by the Special Collections library at St. Lawrence University; and Tierra Fisurada, a Spanish poetry chapbook published in Argentina (Editoriales del Duende, 2002). They collaborated with the artist Laylah Ali for the exhibition booklet of her 2017 art show The Acephalous Series.

Bertram has published poetry, prose, and essays in numerous journals. Their honors include a 2017 Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Grant, a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, finalist nomination for the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, and others. Their essay “To find kisses pressed in books: 100 Years of Gwendolyn Brooks” was featured on the Poetry Foundation’s website in the fall of 2016, where they have previously blogged for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog.

Bertram described their writing process to Mass Poetry: “I never know when what I am going to write will become a poem or something else. This can be a very fraught task. Sometimes what I am writing does not want to be a poem, but something else: a fragment of a larger text that I have yet to conceive or a collage. I think that like most writers, I am always scribbling down a thought in a notebook or on some scrap of paper or post-it note, whatever is handy. From time to time I take a moment, set out all these scraps of paper and notes before me and transcribe them into a document. Maybe a poem comes out of this, but maybe not. Sometimes lines or ideas suggest themselves for other poems that are already in progress but perhaps abandoned and using this method they are given a new life.”

Bertram holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, among degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland. They have previously taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, St. Lawrence University, Ithaca College, and Williams College, and directed the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.

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