Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of several books. Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Bertram is a 2014 recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship. Their chapbook cutthroat glamours (2013) won the Phantom Press chapbook contest. Their first full-length book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), was selected by Claudia Rankine as the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award winner and was a 2013 poetry nominee for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for outstanding works of literature published by people of African descent. Their other books include slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press, 2016), personal science (Tupelo Press, 2016), and Negative Money (Soft Skull Press, 2023).

Bertram is one-sixth of the poetry collective Line Assembly. They have been in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Montana Artists’ Refuge, and Williams College, and they have received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2014, they received a grant from the U.S. Embassy for a writing residency at the Ventspils Writers’ & Translators' House in Latvia. 

Bertram holds degrees in creative writing from the University of Utah where they are the managing editor of Quarterly West; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Carnegie Mellon University. They are currently a Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellow at Ithaca College, where they teach creative writing.