Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

My writing is wide-ranging and concerns the malleability of language and forms. I am interested in the intersections of the innovative and experimental with aspects race, gender, and the more-than-human world. My work is ground in inquiry, ways of knowing, and how language can (and cannot) communicate experiences felt in body and mind. Even at its most cerebral my work is centered in notions of embodiment and the lived experience of seeing and being seen. My practice and process includes photographic and video work and mixed media composition. Current projects include computational poetics and emerging technologies.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Travesty Generator book jacket, print, 6x9. Cover art by Adam Pendleton.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is 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. 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 fifth book, Negative Money, is slated for publication in 2023. As of this writing, they are an Associate Professor in the English Department at UMass Boston where they direct the MFA in Creative Writing program. They also direct the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.

Amanda Choo Quan

Amanda Choo Quan's writing charts the future of social justice movements — while acknowledging their genesis in the Caribbean. Her preferred subtopics are displacement, migration, cruelty, and examining the ways white supremacy has successfully divided Black and Brown populations. She is curious about reparations meaning far more than money, and wonders what a Black transnational state could look like. She is interested in uncovering the ways the United States helped to transform the English-speaking Caribbean from socialist intellectual hotbed into tourist backyard. Her most recent work focuses on telling the stories of Maroons in the Caribbean and their present fight for Indigenous recognition. She is interested in Marronage as a philosophy to counter the flimsiness of this political moment.

Essay by Amanda Choo Quan for Harper's Bazaar.

Amanda Choo Quan is a writer, artist and essayist who is both Trinidadian and Jamaican. Winner of the 2020 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers' Prize, one of the most significant for emerging writers from the region, she is also a Truman Capote, Callaloo, Juniper, REEF Residency and Cropper Foundation fellow. Writing about race, class, and Caribbean culture, she's been published in Harper's Bazaar, Teen Vogue, NYLON, the Huffington Post, LitHub, and Caribbean Beat, among others. She's a graduate of both the California Institute of the Arts and the University of the West Indies. These days, she's either in Trinidad or on an even smaller island off its coast (no, not Tobago). Or maybe elsewhere, chasing a story. She tweets @amandacq.