Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise, was selected by Claudia Rankine as the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award winner and published by Red Hen Press in 2012 and is a 2013 poetry nominee for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for outstanding works of literature published by people of African descent. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Utah where she is an assistant managing editor of Quarterly West.