Every project is a new 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 how poetry and language can exist.

Listen to Lillian-Yvonne on NPR's Marketplace with Kai Rysdall

Bertram's work has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the Ruby's Artist Grants; exhibited from the Poetry Society of America to Paris; and written about in The New Yorker and on NPR's Marketplace. A sought-after speaker on poetry and artificial intelligence, Bertram directs the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland and directs the Studio for Literary Technology.

About

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.

  • TabTalks, Center for Literature 2026, Germany

  • Macondo Seminar, 2026

  • Boston Book Festival, 2019

  • Center for Literary Arts

  • AI & the Humanities, Illinois State University

  • Keynote: 2026 Electronic Literature Organization Conference

  • 2026 Review of Argent Negatif in LE MATRICULE DES ANGE

  • The Frost Place Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence finalist and winner reading, 2026

“Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is an offering to those of us for whom normalcy is the constant shift between a sense of location and dislocation. The shrewdness of these poems accumulates into a critique of our American desires and failures. The precision of Bertram’s lyrical and agile language is born out of the specificity of her gaze on what subliminally feels like a road trip through the towns that make up this country. These unforgettable poems awaken images so masterfully that reading and seeing become one thing… It’s exhilarating to read poetry that pushes reading into the realm of experience.”

— Claudia Rankine

“. . . With resolute doubleness, Bertram’s verses insist on the mutual influences between the world of the mind and the world outside; these lines move fluidly, flagging uncertainty but not dismissing it.”

— Boston Review

“I am astonished by Lillian Yvonne Bertram’s trailblazing poetry in Travesty Generator…She re-engineers language by synthesizing the lyric and coding script, taking the baton from Harryette Mullen and the Oulipians and dashing with it to late 21st century black futurity. Travesty Generatoris genius.”

— Cathy Park Hong

Select Awards

Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant

2024

NEA Poetry Fellowship

2021

2024

Ruby’s Artist Grant

Boston Foundation LIVE Arts Grant

2014

  • World Map: 1990 (from Negative Money)

  • World Map: 1993 (from Negative Money)

  • World Map: 1994 (from Negative Money)

  • World Map: 1998 (from Negative Money)

  • World Map:2018 (from Negative Money)

  • from "Klee in Wartime" (Full Bleed, 2019)

  • from Grand Dessein (2019)

  • from Grand Dessein

  • from Grand Dessein

  • from Grand Dessein

  • from Grand Dessein

  • from Grand Dessein

  • from Grand Dessein

Works in translation