Bill Lavender

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of fourteen published books, most recently his magnum opus city of god (MadHat Press, 2026). His ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, called by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 and translated into Spanish by Enrique Solinas and Peter Thompson; the bilingual edition was released by Yauguru in Uruguay as surrealismo in 2017; a French edition is forthcoming. My ID, his eleventh book of poetry, was released from BlazeVOX in March, 2020. His novel trilogy, Three Letters (comprised of Q, Little A, and The Private I,) appeared from Spuyten Duyvil in 2020.

He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.
by Lavender Ink. His Amazon author page lists most of his books.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.