L. Renée

L. Renée is a poet, nonfiction writer, independent researcher, and story collector. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, Minnesota Review, American Life in Poetry, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She won the National Association of Black Storytellers’ 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellowship, representing the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Library of Congress 2024 Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology. Her honors also include The Arkansas International 2023 Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, and Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award. She is working on a book exploring Black Appalachian communities and traditions.

A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Watering Hole, L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she was Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. She holds and M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. She is a 2024-2025 Poetry Coalition Fellow at Mass Poetry, awarded by the Academy of American Poets, and a 2024-2025 Public Humanities Fellow, awarded by Virginia Humanities.