L. Renée is a poet, nonfiction writer, independent researcher, and collector of her family’s stories. A descendant of proud Black Appalachians who labored in West Virginia coal towns and Virginia tobacco fields, she was selected by the National Association of Black Storytellers as the winner of the 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller’s Fellowship representing the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2024, she was awarded the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress and a 2024-2025 Public Humanities Fellowship from Virginia Humanities.

Her work, nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and two Pushcart Prizes, has been published in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, Water~Stone Review, Poetry Northwest, American Life in Poetry, selected by Kwame Dawes, and other publications. Her poems have been anthologized in I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Zora Den’s The Fire Inside, Volume II (ZD Press), and Poemhood: Our Black Revival (Harper Collins).

L. Renée is the recipient of the 2023 Arkansas International Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award, selected by Jeremy Paden, the 2020 Indiana University Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing, and the 2018 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Alumni Award. She also won third place for the international 2023 Poetry London Prize, judged by Rachel Long, and second place for PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review’s 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize.

She has earned fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, The Watering Hole, and the dots between. Her work has been supported by grants from Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc. and Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and residencies from Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Lafayette Flats’ New River Gorge Creative Residency, and Monson Arts. Her writing has been supported by scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, Longleaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and others.

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, and an MS 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 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

(Home page photo credits: Jeffrey Albright, Archive manager, The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts.)