L. Lamar Wilson
“Having lived & loved in Milwaukee, Chicago, the nation’s capital, rural southwest Virginia, various North Carolina rural & urban educational epicenters, and all over Hotlanta, the so-called black gay mecca, Birmingham is the only space, outside my tiny hometown four hours southeast in North Florida, where I have felt at home. ‘The Magic City’ will be a forever home away from home not only because I saw black folks in power in industry and government—ATL offered countless examples of these fraught markers of race-based pride—but most especially because I found an open, affirming artistic community akin to that which I dreamed possible but could enter as my whole multiethnically black, quare, differently abled, and neurodiverse self. Ashley Jones & her comrades know what ‘family’ means, & wherever I am, I carry my Birmingham family with me.”
L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion—the 2012 selection for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, a 2013 Independent Publishers Group bronze medalist, and a 2013 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry finalist—and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with Phillip B. Williams, Rickey Laurentiis, Saeed Jones, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. The Changing Same, a documentary short film based upon his Pushcart-nominated poem "Resurrection Sunday," won a special jury prize at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival.
His poems and essays have appeared in African American Review, Black Gay Genius (2014), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, jubilat, Muzzle, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010), Oxford American, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (2015), Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Vinyl, The Washington Post/The Root, and elsewhere. Wilson, a Cave Canem and Callaloo graduate fellow and Florida A&M University alum, holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches creative writing at The University of Alabama and in the low-residency MFA program at Mississippi University for Women.