L. Renée

L. Renée is a poet, nonfiction writer, and collector of her family’s stories. She won the National Association of Black Storytellers’ 2023 Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowship, representing the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the 2024 Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress. She also received the 2023 Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize from The Arkansas International, the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award, and third place for the 2023 Poetry London Prize.

Renée’s work has been published in Obsidian, Poetry Northwest, minnesota review, American Life in Poetry selected by Kwame Dawes, and other publications. Her work has been supported by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and other organizations. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and The Watering Hole, L. Renée earned an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she was nonfiction editor of Indiana Review, and an MS in journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow.