Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award, and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, and the anthology Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
Russell was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2016 to 2020. She is now as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and is director of the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU.
At MacDowell, Russell completed edits for her third book, A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, a poetic hybrid work forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 as part of its neurodiversity-themed Multiverse series. Given the publisher's deadline, the two weeks at MacDowell were essential to completing this work on time.
