Impactful artistic experimentation
Each of my works is an experiment—from the lyric to code to visual poetics. I've written in fragments, in the sonnet form, in my own and imagined voices. I’ve composed poems with machine translation, Python algorithms, and artificial intelligence to push the boundaries of what poetry and language can do.
Bertram's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the Ruby's Artist Grants; shown from the Poetry Society of America to Paris; and written about in The New Yorker and on NPR's Marketplace. They direct the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where they also direct the Studio for Literary Technology.
About
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is a poet, writer, and creative coder whose work refuses to sit still. It moves across the whole range of experimental practice — from the sonnet to the neural network, from hand-stamped artist books to poems written in code — and each book arrives as a different experiment in what a poem can be, and do, and hold.
The author of five poetry collections — including Travesty Generator, longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award — and, with Nick Montfort, co-editor of Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 (MIT Press), Bertram is among the field's leading voices on poetry and computation. Their work turns code on the systems that count and price Black life, listens back to poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Tyehimba Jess, and asks a machine what it believes itself to be. A memoir is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
Awards
Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant
2024
2024
Ruby’s Artist Grant
Boston Foundation LIVE Arts Grant
2014
NEA Poetry Fellowship
2022
Works in translation
