Lauren Russell Wins 2017 Creative Writing Award from the National Endowment for the Arts

Lauren Russell, assistant director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, has been awarded a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Through the fellowship — which carries a monetary award of $25,000 — Russell plans to further develop a book-length work, tentatively titled Descent. The book is a hybrid work of poems, lyrical essays, images, and documents based on her family history.