Len Lawson (Of Asylums, Poetic Histories, and Rest)

Read: "Psychology for Black Folk" at Jasper Project

Purchase: Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane (Main Street Rag, 2023)

Len Lawson is author of Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane (Main Street Rag, 2023), Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019), and the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line Press, 2017). He is also co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Press, 2021) and Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race (Muddy Ford Press, 2017). South Carolina Humanities awarded him a 2022 Governor's Award for Fresh Voices in the Humanities.  He has received fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo Barbados, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. His poetry appears in African American Review, Callaloo, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, Poetry Northwest, and has been translated internationally. Len earned a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A South Carolina native, he is currently Assistant Professor of English at Newberry College. 

More reading recommended from this episode:

Joshua Bennett's Being Property Once Myself

Nikky Finney's Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts
Honorée Fannon Jeffers The Age of Phillis