L. Lamar Wilson
L. LAMAR WILSON’s cross-genre work centers the voices and experiences of black, brown, and indigenous folk thriving in the rural South despite white nationalist terror. His native Marianna, just 65 miles west of Tallahassee off Interstate 10, often serves as the Yoknapatawpha where his speakers contemplate cross-cultural intimacies. After nearly 18 years of award-winning editing in several of the nation’s top newsrooms, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and faculty appointments at Davidson College, The University of Alabama, and Wake Forest University, Wilson returns to the Big Bend to expand on documentary impulses that have produced poetry, nonfiction and scholarly prose, musical theater, and film. He’s the author of Sacrilegion—the 2012 selection for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, an Independent Publishers Group bronze medalist, and a Thom Gunn Award finalist—and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry P, 2014), with Phillip B. Williams, Rickey Laurentiis, Saeed Jones, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. The Gospel Truth, a musical adaptation of Sacrilegion, was performed in Miami and Tallahassee, the latter time with a troupe that honors artists who, like Wilson, are neurodiverse or live with physical differences. The Changing Same, a collaboration with Rada Film Group that aired in PBS’s POV Shorts series, won the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Best Documentary Award and a special jury prize at the New Orleans Film Festival. Vinyl nominated the poem featured in the film, “Resurrection Sunday,” for a Pushcart Prize; in 2021, Oxford American nominated "Quare" for the prize as well.
In addition to The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, and Poetry, Wilson’s poems and essays have appeared in This Is the Honey (Hatchette, 2024), Bigger than Bravery (Lookout Books, 2022), the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, African American Review, Black Gay Genius (2014), Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing (U of Nebraska P, 2019), Callaloo, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern UP, 2019), Interim, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (U of Georgia P, 2019), The 100 Best African American Poems (2010), Obsidian, Oxford American, Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), The Root, The Washington Post, south, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.
Wilson has received fellowships from, among others, the Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, Ragdale, and Hurston-Wright foundations. He’s a Florida A&M alumnus and holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wilson, an Affrilachian Poet and the 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, teaches creative writing, film and gender studies, and African American poetics at FSU and also teaches in the Mississippi University for Women’s low-residency MFA program.
Publications, Film, Stage Productions
POETRY
Selected Poems
Poetry (in journals & other single-issue, peer-reviewed publications)
“Lauren Oya Olamina Explains Earthseed to Ernest Hemingway.” The Academy of American Poets. Poets.org. 28 July 2025. Curated by Khadijah Queen.
“from ‘Take Me Back, Burden Hill.’ ” The Slowdown. 13 August 2024. Curated by Major Jackson.
“Annus Mirabilis: Your Silence Will Not Protect You.” New American Studies Journal. 22 July 2024.
“from ‘Missionary.’” The Nation. 30 May 2024.
“from ‘Take Me Back, Burden Hill.’ ” The Academy of American Poets/Poets.org. 18 April 2024. Curated by Cyrus Cassells.
“Look at You, Fox.” Los Angeles Review of Books 35 (“Isn’t It Uncanny?” Issue). Fall 2022.
“Dis Closure.” underbelly 13. Summer 2022.
“Burden Hill Apothecary and Babalú-Ayé Prepare Stinging Nettle Tea” and “Aubade Tanka.” Poetry/Poetry Foundation. July/August 2021.
“Winter in America, or Shoveling,” “I Held Hope in My Hand,” “In the Cat’s Cradle, An Embrace,” “PrEPositions.” Interim 37.3-4 (Winter 2020). 31 December 2020.
“Quare.” Oxford American (Winter Music Issue). 10 November 2020. (Pushcart nominee)
“How to Make Tea Cake,” “Ghazal of the Naptime Blues,” “To the Polka Dot Muumuu My Mother Loved to See Her Mother Wear.” South Writ Large. Summer 2020.
“Digging.” The New York Times. June 2019.
“Nursing.” Academy of American Poets/Poets.org. October 2018.
“From ‘Negus in Paris.’” Hunger Mountain, vol. 22, Spring 2018, pp. 144-45.
“The Mourning After the Morning After: Oct. 3, 2017.” Talking River, January 2018, p. 143.
“How to Disclose,” “How to Pick Cotton,” “How to Bake Bread.” Crazyhorse, vol. 91, Spring 2017, pp. 38-40.
“PrEPositions.” HEArt. Spring 2017.
“Skylight, Skylark: Marshall, N.C., July 15, 2013.” Englisch betrifft uns (German textbook for tweens & teens studying English), January 2017.
“Games.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 89, no. 4, Winter 2015, p. 158. Guest Ed. Natalie Diaz.
“Cake,” “The First Shower,” “In Search of Abe in DuPoint Circle.” The Good Men Project. September and December 2014 and February 2015.
“Touch: A Letter to the Mother.” The Feminist Wire. March 2013.
“Dear Uncle Sam.” TheThe Poetry Blog. December 2012.
“Family Reunion, 1993” and “To the Green Polka Dot Muumuu Mother Loved to See Her Mother Wear.” African American Review, vol. 45, nos. 1-2, Spring/Summer 2012, p. 238.
“Times Like These: Marianna, Florida.” Callaloo, vol. 33, no. 4, 2010, p. 1005.
Poetry (in Anthologies)
“Resurrection Sunday,” “I Can’t Help It,” and “Legion Human Immunodeficiency Virus.” Every Place on the Map Is Disabled. Northwestern UP, 2026.
“On Passing, or How to Stare at a Kardashian’s Bum Without Blinking.” Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa. Wesleyan UP, 2024.
“Quare.” This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. Little, Brown/Hatchette, 2024.
“How to Make a Tea Cake” and “Burden Hill Apothecary and Babalú-Ayé Prepare Stinging Nettle Tea.” Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic. Lookout Books, 2022.
“Afterword: Burden Hill, I’ve Been in the Storm Too Long” and “Burden Hill Whip-poor-Will, I Play Dead.” Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society. Eds. Edward Chan and Patricia Ventura. Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. pp. 301-02.
“Eastern Whip-poor-Will: Burden Hill Whip-poor-Will, I Play Dead.” A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. Eds. Rose McLarney and Laura Gray-Street. U of Georgia P, 2019, p. 90.
“Games.” Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing. Ed. Natalie Diaz. U of Nebraska P, 2019, p. 201.
“Resurrection Sunday.” Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. 2nd Ed. Eds. Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Allenye. Triquarterly/Northwestern UP, 2019, pp. 138-41.
“Times Like These: Marianna, Florida.” Vinegar and Char: Southern Food in Verse. Ed. Sandra Beasley. U of Georgia P, 2018. p. 7
“I Can’t Help It.” “Resurrection Sunday.” Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos. Ed. Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor. Anhinga P, 2018. pp. 168-72.
“Prelude: I Can’t Help It,” “Times Like These: Marianna, Florida,” “Dear Uncle Sam.” Anthology of Young Poetry of the U.S.A. Ed. Taras Malkovych. A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA Press, 2016.
“We Do Not Know Her Name.” Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation. Eds. Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick. Viking Penguin, 2015, p. 92.
“What of a Body.” White Space Poetry Anthology. White Space Poetry Project, 2014.
Creative Nonfiction Publications & Journalism
Peer-Reviewed Nonfiction Essays & Journalism (as L.L. Wilson, Lamar Wilson and L. Lamar Wilson)
“‘I Wouldn’t Help It Even If I Could.’” Every Place on the Map Is Disabled. Northwestern UP, 2026.
“The Autonomy of My Black Mind: Reflections on Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen.” Oxford American. In press. 202?.
“Nikki Giovanni made me a poet. Listen, and she’ll make you one too.” Los Angeles Times. 15 December 2024.
“‘There Are Few Moments More Beautiful in This Life’: The Reckoning and Reverie of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again: An Interview With A. Van Jordan.” July 2024. Michigan Quarterly Review.
“‘Touch & Intimacy & Kinship’: D’Angelo Lovell Williams’s on Photography, Landscape, and His Body of Work.” 27 July 2021. The Bitter Southerner.
“The South Got Something to Say: As Nasty As They Wanna Be, “Cell Therapy,” “Scarred,” “Walk It Out (Remix),” Eve.” 3 August 2020. NPR.
“Queen of Snow Hill.” Oxford American, Winter 2018, pp. 136-43.
- Revisited in Summer-Fall 2019 in several media interviews, including with NPR’s Rodney Carmichael and The Breakfast Club; hip-hop artist Rapsody acknowledges our conversation as the inspiration for the focus of her 2019 album, Eve.
“Falling to Fly: Letting the Black Female Within Guide as White Supremacy Thrives.” VIDA Review Feature. 9 April 2018.
“Queer Black Avant-Garde Poetics: On Being Guilty of Excessive Darkness in the First Degree.” The Force of What Is Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. Ed. Amy King and Lily Hoang. Nightboat Books, 2014.
These Mythologizing Is: On Tending to the Past and Autobiography.” Poets’ Roundtable on Person and Persona. Los Angeles Review of Books. 22 October 2013.
Silence and Shame in the Black Church.” The Root. 26 October 2011.
“‘The Help’: Missed Opportunities.” The Root. 13 August 2011.
“One Man’s Horizons Opened Through E. Lynn Harris’s Unabashed Romances.” Washington Post. 24 July 2009.
“Q&A/NIKKI GIOVANNI: ‘You have to learn to trust yourself.’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 30 January 2007.
“Morrison brings us face to face with the blood, pain of slavery.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 24 May 2003.
“Singing with dignity and defiance: Simone’s songs, style demanded attention.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 22 April 2003.
“Seeing ‘Souls of Black Folk’ through prism of a century.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 4 April 2003
SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS
Monograph and Co-edited Book
Kweer: Who Can Sing an Orphaned Mama’s Freedom Song? (under consideration at university presses)
Understanding Contemporary Black Poetry: Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter (under contract with Routledge; co-written with Gena E. Chandler)
Book Chapters
“You Play Too Much: George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, Jeremy O. Harris, Jordan Cooper, and the (De)volution of Black Gay Fantasia and Satire on the Great White Way.” Bloomsbury Handbook to Black Queer Writing and Cultural Expression. Bloomsbury. In press.
“Let’s Talk About Pronouns: Black Femmes, the Prose Poem, and the Second Person.” The [Oxford] Handbook of African American Women’s Writing. Ed. Simone C. Drake. Oxford UP. In press.
“Naylor’s ‘Bottomless Well of Mercy’: Anality, Gender Transgression, and Blues Poetics in Bailey’s Cafe and The Men of Brewster Place.” Critical Essays on Gloria Naylor and the Archive, Vol. 2. Eds. Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Mary C. Foltz, and Suzanne M. Edwards. U of Mississippi P. In press.
Journal Articles
“ ‘The Sweet Meat of My Feelings’: The Ghost of LeRoi Jones and the (Re)Birth of a Quare Nation.” Callaloo 41.2 (Fall 2021/2018: “Elegy” Issue; ed. Joshua Bennett). pp. 124-145.
“Birthing America's Kweer: Motherless Children Preach the Gospel of Mercy.” south (formerly Southern Literary Journal) LI.1 (Fall 2019). pp. 298-317.
“‘She Is Twenty-Three Months Pregnant’: The Quaring of Black Maternity in Bob Kaufman’s Surreal Migration Narratives.” Obsidian, vol. 41, no. 2, 2015, pp. 335-431.
BOOK REVIEWS
Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 3, Summer 2014, 735-39.
“The Beauty of Troubled Tongues.” Post No Ills. January 2010.
SCHOLARLY PAPERS AND LECTURES
“‘Somebody Take Me in Your Arms Tonight’: On Sula, Sinners, and the Embrace of Jukin’ Madness in the Black Bottom.” Society of Utopian Studies. Tulum, Mexico. 31 October 2025.
“‘Be a Beast at It, Be the Best at It’: On Chris Brown and FBucking Until the End of Time.” Association for the Study of Arts in the Present. Rice University. Houston. 24 October 2025.
“The Autonomy of My Black Mind, Or: The Invisible Hand Speaks” + “Take Me Back, Burden Hill.” Society of Utopian Studies. Tulum, Mexico. 18 October 2024.
“Black Anality Beyond the Binary: Gloria Naylor’s ‘Bottomless Well of Mercy’ in Bailey’s Café and The Men of Brewster Place.” Society of Utopian Studies. Austin. 10 November 2023.
“The Invisible Hands in the Stories We Tell Ourselves—and You.” Zoeglossia 2023 Keynote. 10 May 2023.
“Teaching Empathy in the Creative Writing Classroom in the Pandemic World.” College Language Association. Atlanta Perimeter Westin/Emory University. 9 April 2023.
“The Autonomy of My Black Mind: Reflections on the ‘Child Atlanta Murders.’ ” College Language Association. Atlanta Perimeter Westin/Emory University. 9 April 2023.
“Revisiting ‘The Characteristics of Negro Expression’ in Our ‘Post’-Pandemic Art Making.” Zora Neale Hurston Craft Lecture/Zora Neale Hurston Writers Conference. Bethune Cookman College. 16 February 2023.
“ ‘No One in the Streets … Believed It for a Moment’: Baldwin’s Southern Reportage, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and Racial and Social Discourse in the 21st Century.” La Maison Baldwin. Nice, France. 17 June 2022.
“ ‘The Typology of Taint’: Natasha Trethewey’s Roadmap for a Femme Future in the Global South.”
Panel: “After Morrison: Twenty-First-Century African Diasporic Cultural Production in the Wake of Toni Morrison.” MLA Virtual/Zoom Convention. With Simone C. Drake, Jesse Goldberg, and Ryan Sharp. 10 January 2021.
Lecture: “‘The Changing Same’: .” How Documentary Film + Poetics Can Subvert the Gaze of Ambivalence and Call Spectators Into Antiracist Engagement with Black Lives.” “Black Matters: A Teach-In A Teach-In on Language, Literature, Rhetoric, Writing, and Verbal Art.” Virginia Tech English Department. Zoom. 30 June 2020.
“More Than a Metaphor: The Ethics of Writing Through a Legacy of Racialized Violence.” Frank Islam Anthenaeum Symposia Fall 2019 Series. Montgomery College. Germantown, Md. 8 October 2019.
“Lost Johnson, McKay Novels Extend the Arc of Satire in the New Negro Renaissance.” MLA International Symposium: “Remembering Lost Voices.” Universidade Católica Portuguesa-Lisbon. 25 July 2019.
“Quaring Myths: The Poetics of Sun Ra and Gil Scott-Heron and the Black Maternal.” MLA International Symposium: “Remembering Lost Voices.” Universidade Católica Portuguesa-Lisbon. 24 July 2019.
Film
Documentary short
The Changing Same. Associate Producer. 22 July 2019-January 2024. With Rada Film Group.
- Opened POV Shorts’s 2nd season; aired in PBS markets and streamed online.
- Featured on Code Switch, Up First, and White Lies perennially throughout the uprisings of 2020 and 2021, elevating conversations impacting the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act of 2022’s passage.
- Won 2019 Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Best Doc and 2018 New Orleans Special Jury prizes.
- Screened at 2018-2019 Full Frame (Durham, N.C.); Hot Springs (Ark.); Miami; Pan African (Los Angeles); Salem, Mass.; Smithsonian African American (Washington, D.C.); & St. Louis festivals.
- Featured on Code Switch, Up First, and White Lies in October 2019 and perennially throughout 2020.
- Inspired Rada Film Group’s POV Spark/Scatter virtual-reality experience, which uses the same title I developed for our film and for which an actor/my avatar is a “virtual guide”; after a successful debut at Sundance, it won the 2021 Best Immersive Award at Tribeca.
DRAMA
Perfect. Commissioned by The Cherry Arts Theatre Inc. Ithaca, NY (in revisions, possible workshop in 2027)
The Gospel Truth.
Mickee Faust Club. Adelaide Schnittman Hall. Tallahassee, FL, 2-3 June 2017.
- Full staging of one-act play with cast of three Faust players, featured on WFSU (88.9 -FM), Tallahassee Democrat, TallahasseeArtsGuide.com, and WTXL-ABC.
Reading Queer Festival. Miami Botanical Gardens. Miami Gardens, Fla. 30 August 2014.
- Dramatic reading/workshop of a draft of the one-act, with three operatic singers (tenor, baritone, and bass), featured in The Miami Herald, Miami New Times, and other local media.
READINGS, INTERVIEWS, & PERFORMANCES
“A Strange and Bitter Crop” and “The Lynching of Claude Neal.” NPR’s Code Switch, Up First, and White Lies. 29, 26, 22 October 2019. Throughout March 2020 as protests fomented.
“Poetry Reading & Film Screening: Wake Forest University.” ZSR Library Auditorium (404). 15 October 2019. Old Gold & Black Interview, front page, 17 October 2019.
“Poetry Reading: Cincinnati Black Pride.” Contemporary Art Center. 21 June 2019.
“Poetry Invocation: ‘Better: Skylight, Skylark.’ ” Mellon Foundation Board of Trustees Meeting: “Enduring Injustice, Legacies of Resistance.” Alley Station—The Warehouse. Montgomery, Ala. 6 June 2019.
AWARDS
2019 Best Documentary Winner, Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival, The Changing Same
2018 Special Jury Prize, New Orleans Film Festival, The Changing Same
FELLOWSHIPS/GRANTS/SCHOLARSHIPS
2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet, Stanford University
2024 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship
2022-2023 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship, Florida Education Fund (~$15K)
2021 First Year Assistant Professor Grant (FSU, $20K)
2019 Ragdale Foundation Residency Grant
