R J Lambert
R.J. Lambert (he, him, his) grew up near Denver and survived the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado. He has since been interested in how individuals and communities respond to crises—relationship violence, environmental disasters, mental health, and HIV/AIDS—through writing.
R.J.'s highly anticipated debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon (2022, Finishing Line Press), debuted at #1 in Amazon's HIV/AIDS new releases and was an Amazon Top 50 Best Seller in LGBT Poetry. His poems have been featured in numerous print and online venues, including the forthcoming anthology Without a Doubt (New York Quarterly Books). The poem “Habits of Creature” was chosen by Kaveh Akbar to receive the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from the literary journal New Letters, and The Worcester Review nominated “Indelible in the Hippocampus” for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Other poems were published finalists for the Tupelo Quarterly Broadside Prize and the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize.
As one of the first alumni of the undergraduate writing program at the University of Colorado at Denver, R.J. co-founded the student literary journal that would become Copper Nickel with fellow students and the late poet Jake Adam York. As a graduate student and Michener Poetry Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, he co-founded and co-edited the literary journal Bat City Review along with poets Jessica Piazza, James Capozzi, and Kurt Heinzelman.
R.J. also holds a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Texas at El Paso. He has presented and published research on failed crisis responses to ecological disasters, teaching and learning during extreme situations, diversity and cancel culture, queer representation in contemporary literature, and the poetry and poetics of HIV/AIDS. His recent book chapters are in included in the collections Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail (2020, Peter Lang) and Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies (2022, Peter Lang).
Having worked for many years in cancer research as a medical editor and grant writer at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, R.J. now teaches scientific and professional writing in the Center for Academic Excellence & Writing Center at the Medical University of South Carolina. Within the MUSC Office of Humanities, he regularly assists with courses offerings, humanities events, and outreach programs, such as MUSC’s annual statewide Septima P. Clark Student Poetry Competition.
