| Lillian Yvonne Bertram | |
| Occupation: | Associate Professor, University of Maryland |
| Education: | PhD, University of Utah[1] MFA, University of Illinois BA, Carnegie Mellon University (2006) |
| Thesis Title: | Personal science |
| Thesis Url: | https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/ |
| Thesis Year: | 2015h |
| Nationality: | African American |
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an American poet known for their work on poetry and digital storytelling.
Bertram holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Utah,[2] in addition to degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[3] Bertram is an associate professor at the University of Maryland.[4]
Bertram is known for their work on poetry, African-American poetry, poetics, digital storytelling, digital and computational poetics, media arts, and pedagogy. Their first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is a series of poems that make note of mental and physical landscapes that portray the connection with body, space, time, and love.[5]
Bertram has published other books including Personal Science, a work that explores some occurrences that can result from obsessive thinking.[6] In April 2016, a slice from the cake made of air, was published and it processes the physical and mental trauma of abortions, as well as sexual desire and contemporary culture.[7] Published on December 1, 2019, Travesty Generator consists of poetry generated using an open-source coding and presents how the black experience has become homogenized, branded, and codified for the dissemination by capitalism.[8]
In 2011, Bertram received the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award for their book But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise.[9] Bertram was the 2015 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship,[10] and the 2017 recipient of the Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Grant.[11] In 2020 Bertram received the Anna Rabinowitz Prize for Travesty Generator,[12] which was also a nominee for the National Book Award for Poetry.[13]