Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. His debut poetry collection, Strange Flowers, is out from YesYes Books in 2025. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program, and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles. He has been published in Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, among others. Bryan is a Cave Canem fellow and received the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
2025 Bookworm Blockparty
Speaker – Garden of Possibilities
