Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press 2017).

A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and residencies from Millay Arts, the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, City of Asylum/ Passa Porta, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ox-Bow, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others.

From 2016 to 2020, Lauren was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2020 to 2023, she served on the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU. In 2023, she joined the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.