Bill Lavender

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. My ID, his eleventh book of poetry, was published by BlazeVOX in October, 2019. His novel trilogy, Three Letters, was released in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. His verse memoir, Memory Wing, 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.

He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, and Diálogos, devoted to cross-cultural literatures.

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

here city of god meets
city of an other
and the broken husks 
wash up on shore…
you can smell the stench
​for miles down the beach

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Police created the modern concept of Identity through this assumption of universal guilt among the working class. One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol. 

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