Sunday, January 25, 2026 - L. Lamar Wilson
/L. Lamar Wilson, a multi-genre writer and filmmaker invested in documentary poetics, 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 finalist—and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014, ed. Jericho Brown), with Phillip B. Williams, Rickey Laurentiis, Saeed Jones, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. The Gospel Truth, a musical adaptation of Sacrilegion, was staged in 2014 and 2017, the latter time with a troupe that honors artists with cognitive and physical divergences and disabilities. The Changing Same, a POV Short collaboration with Rada Film Group that airs on PBS, was a special jury prize winner at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival and named best documentary at the Sisters of the Diaspora Reel Film Festival, an honor for Rada's Michèle Stephenson. Vinyl nominated the poem at the film's center, “Resurrection Sunday,” for a Pushcart Prize.
Wilson’s art centers the voices and experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folk, particularly femmes, thriving in the rural South despite relentless, centuries-long, settler-colonialist terrorism. Recent poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Michigan Quarterly Review, New American Studies Journal, Hemingway Review, This Is the Honey (Little, Brown/Hatchette, 2024), Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (Lookout Books, 2022), Poetry, and The New York Times.
Wilson, a Florida A&M alumnus, has received fellowships from, among others, the Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, Ragdale, and Hurston-Wright foundations and the Florida Education Fund. He holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After nearly 18 years of award-winning editing in several of the nation’s top newsrooms, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and professorial appointments at Davidson College, the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, and Wake Forest University, Wilson teaches creative writing, literature, film and gender studies at Florida State University and in the low-residency MFA program at Mississippi University for Women.
Zoom Reading Sunday, January 25, 2026 at 4:40pm
Suggested Donation $20