Lauren Russell balances personal history and poetry

When Lauren Russell found photocopies of her great-great-grandfather’s diary in Texas, it marked the beginning of a journey digging through census records and trekking across the country.

She first heard about the diary when her brother saw it mentioned in a genealogical online forum in 2013. Although she has yet to find the original diary, Russell’s research led her to the photocopies, housed at the Polk County Historical Society in East Texas.  

Russell and her family traveled to Houston to contact distant relatives and collect oral histories, census records and other historical documents that could offer insights into the life of her Confederate great-great-grandfather Robert Wallace “Bob” Hubert. The Hubert family at one point owned a slave named Dinah Alfred. Bob Hubert fathered children with three of Dinah’s daughters, one of whom was named Peggy. One of Peggy’s nine children with Hubert was Russell’s great-grandmother.

The diary, and the lost voice of Peggy, became the inspiration for Russell’s new book “Descent.”

Russell will continue work on this project over the next year with the help of a $25,000 grant through the 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. Russell, who has an MFA in poetry from Pitt, works as the assistant director of Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. 

The desire to reclaim Peggy’s voice drives Russell to work on this four-year-long project. Her project makes Russell into a semi-historian, although she fills in the omissions from history with creative expression and poetry.

With “Descent,” Russell is bringing her own life deeper into her work than usual and will incorporate historical records of her own family’s past as well as poetry and lyric essays.

“Living with this project became part of the project,” Russell said.

Russell, primarily a poet, has been honing her storytelling craft since before she could wield a pen or pencil.

“Before I knew how to write, I would dictate stories to my mom, and she would write them down,” Russell said.

Before she set out on this historical project, Russell lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where she engaged in more poetry writing than historical narrative. Her days in Madison were spent in her favorite coffee shop, with a cup of black coffee and a plate of vegetarian quiche, even when she didn’t feel in the mood to write.

“A lot of the time it is just about showing up and doing it and not as much about feeling inspired,” Russell said. “I do not really do a lot of submitting to journals. A lot of my publications in the last few years have been solicited, which is fortunate, but I am really a lot more interested in the process of writing.”

At the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Russell now works alongside one of her former professors, Dawn Lundy Martin, who co-founded the Center.

“I’ve known Lauren for about five years now and remember distinctly the experience of reading her application for the MFA before she became a student,” Martin said. “At the outset, Lauren Russell’s writing was accomplished, invigorating and off-kilter in just that right way, inviting us into the wild imagination.”

As evidence of her “wild imagination,” moderated by structured writing prompts in graduate school, Russell authored a poem titled “_than Cake” after watching a documentary about asexuality. The filmmakers asked what is better than sex, and Russell’s response at the time was cake.

“I wound up sexualizing cake,” Russell said. “I worked through many drafts where I felt like I was working through all these ideas on the page around being in the world, and the page became this kind of laboratory where that happened.”

The central themes that motivate Russell in “_than Cake” as well as her current project are gender, race and sexuality, topics that play into and interact with current attitudes in the world around her.

Russell brings this perspective to her work with the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, where she serves as the assistant director. The Center is a product of a deliberate effort by Don Bialostosky, the chair of the English Department, working with Martin as well as Pitt poetry Professors Terrance Hayes and Yona Harvey.

“We sat down together to talk about what could we do having such a strong group of African American poets here who can really make it visible and make something happen, and the center emerged from that conversation,” Bialostosky said.

Now, Russell uses her role as both a poet and administrator to bring greater relevance to the work of African American poets.

“Poetry has the capacity to give its readers a feeling in a specific moment of time,” Russell said. “The time and political climate often play a factor. Don’t think that poetry exists in a vacuum.”