Photograph by Valaurian Waller.
|bio
Detroit native Lillien Waller is a poet and essayist whose recent work explores art and experience and the role of art within the intimate spheres of family life. In 2011, Lillien edited American Ghost (Stockport Flats), a collection of poetry, lyric essays and photography examining the impacts of de-industrialization on community, culture, identity and the natural world. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and, in 2015, she received a Kresge Artist Fellowship in Poetry. From 2022 to 2023, in collaboration with Kresge Arts in Detroit, Lillien wrote the essay series Practice, which meditated on art practice and the creative impulse across disciplines. She has shown her own interdisciplinary artwork at Wasserman Projects and as part of Wayne State University Galleries’ public art series, In the Air II. In 2023, Lillien was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and in 2024 she received Writeability’s Right to Write Award.
|selected prose & poetry
Spring 2026 “Listen Children, All is not Lost,” in Black Summers: Detroiters on Race and the Urban Outdoors (forthcoming, Wayne State University Press)
2022–2023 practice: essays. Meditations on art and creative practice across visual art and literary disciplines at Kresge Arts in Detroit Presents. Featuring Christopher Alexander, Tommye Blount, Ann Eskridge, Mariam Ezzat, bree gant, Cynthia Greig, Joan Kee and Neha Vedpathak.
2013 “Daddy Came Home to the War” in New Orleans Review
2012 “Scarecrow” (with audio) in Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics
2011 American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (ed.), Stockport Flats: Witness Post Series. Collection of poetry, lyric essays and photography exploring the impact of deindustrialization on communities, the individual and the natural world. Includes the poems “Bounty,” “Brother,” and “Eulogy” and the essay/introduction, “‘The Answer is Not One, But Also Not Two’: Ghosts, Gods and Humane Sustainability”
|exhibits
2021 “Face, Off (Noire et Blanche),” billboard installation for the public art series In The Air II: Voices from Detroit and Beyond, September 28–October 15, curated by Tyanna Buie at The Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit
2019 “One Practice,” poem/installation for Parallel Visions, July 12–August 24, curated by Alison Wong at Wasserman Projects, Detroit
|HONORS & AWARDS
2024 Right to Write Award, Writeability, a nonprofit in defense of the imagination
2023 Arts Writers Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
2015 Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts (Poetry), Kresge Foundation
|readings, panels, talks
2024 Honoree & Featured Reader, Writeability Guild Right to Write Award Celebration, October 1, with co-honoree Fatima Bhojani. Writeability endeavors to teach an embodied, revelatory approach to the craft of writing and the writing life.
2023 Panelist, Roundtable and launch for Among the Neighbors (pamphlet series), Vols. 21, 22, 23, March 10. Vol. 22 documents and celebrates SEEDS: The Biannual Literary Journal of the Sisters of Color (SOC, 1990–2000), which resides in The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries at University of Buffalo.
2021 Kresge Artist Fellow Lecture, “Face, Off (Noire et Blanche),” In the Air II Lecture Series, October 6, Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University
|EDUCATION
2008 MA, Culture, History, Theory. Concentration: Modern Aesthetics. Laney Graduate School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Taught undergraduate visual culture, focusing on global modernism in art, photography and film.
2005 MA, Liberal Studies. Concentration: Intellectual History. The Graduate Faculty in Political and Social Science, New School for Social Research, New York, New York
1995 MFA, Poetry. Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York
1988 BA, English. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan