Lauren Russell, assistant director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, has been awarded a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Through the fellowship — which carries a monetary award of $25,000 — Russell plans to further develop a book-length work, tentatively titled Descent. The book is a hybrid work of poems, lyrical essays, images, and documents based on her family history.