Lauren Russell: A WINDOW THAT CAN NEITHER OPEN NOR CLOSE

With excitement, Bird in Hand announces this hometown event for poet and professor Lauren Russell's new poetry collection, A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance! Fellow poets Soham Patel and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram will join to read alongside Russell in this celebratory evening.

And there is much to celebrate in A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close. The subtitle, Poems, Plots, Chance, invokes the many modes of meaning-making alive in this collection - from a pop quiz to a twelve-sided die to a box of mirrors - all of which make poetry of the space between knowing and not-knowing.

Whether you're new to poetry or a frequent reader, we invite you to experience (because it is a full experience) this collection via this event.

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.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their most recent full length poetry book, Negative Money, was published in 2023. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts poetry grant recipient and 2024 Ruby’s Grant recipient.

Soham Patel is the author of the poetry collections to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018), ever really hear it (Subito, 2018 [winner of the 2017 Subito Prize, chosen by Mathias Svalina]), and all one in the end—water (Delete, 2023) and the chapbooks and nevermind the storm, New Weather Drafts (Portable Press @Yo-Yo Labs), in airplane and other poems (Oxeye Press), and Riva: A Chapter (Kitchen-Shy Press). Recent poetry has appeared in Interim, Under-belly, and Prairie Schooner.

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