West Virginia University Libraries’ Art in the Libraries Committee in collaboration with West Virginia & Regional History Center (WVRHC) archivists selected L. Renée as the 2026 Mountain Artist in Residency awardee.
Selected for her proposed artwork, “Remain,” Renée’s forthcoming residency project will be an interdisciplinary poetry and performance exhibit that will use archival resources on mountaintop removal to probe a vital question: after a mountain is stripped, blasted, displaced, and “reclaimed,” what truly remains?
Working with environmental, geological, and community archives from the WVRHC during her residency, Renée will examine how both human and non-human life endure, and are altered by, violent ecological rupture.
“’Remain’ is exactly the kind of project we hoped for in this residency — work that doesn’t just use archives, but activates them,” said Art in the Libraries Curator Sally Brown. “L. Renée turns documents into living poetry, asking us to reckon with what’s left behind and what still matters.”
Renée’s exhibit will feature four original poetic forms including erasure poetry, contrapuntal poetry, found poetry, and ekphrastic poetry. The poems will be framed and displayed in WVU Libraries, demonstrating how meaning can be made from materials that “remain” like human stories, letters, photographs, and ephemera.
“I’m truly honored to be selected as an artist in residence at WVU Libraries and look forward to exploring archives there,” said Renée. “I hope my work will help demonstrate the importance of collective witnessing in our environments—of refusing to look away, no matter how difficult the sight—and how we must learn from our past to create more sustainable futures.”
I’m truly honored to be selected as an artist in residence at WVU Libraries and look forward to exploring archives there. I hope my work will help demonstrate the importance of collective witnessing in our environments. L. Renée, poet, story collector, and nonfiction writer
Renée is a poet, story collector, and nonfiction writer based in West Virginia. Winner of the international Rattle Poetry Prize, The Arkansas International’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, and the Gerald E. And Corrine L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, her work has been anthologized and published in “Obsidian,” “Tin House Online,” “Callaloo,” “Poetry Northwest,” “American Life in Poetry,” and elsewhere.
She has earned grants and fellowships from Mid Atlantic Arts — including being recently selected as one of 40 artists across the country to receive a Walking Together grant — National Association of Black Storytellers, Cave Canem, the Watering Hole, West Virginia Creative Network, Virginia Humanities, Academy of American Poets, and the Black Genius Foundation. Renée’s debut collection of poetry, prose, artifacts, and photography is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky.
In honor of National Poetry Month and Earth Week, Renée will return to Morgantown on April 23 to display the results of her residency and speak at a public program to be held in the Milano Reading Room of the Downtown Library at 4 p.m.
Event attendees will have the opportunity to learn about Renée’s creative process, listen to the poems, watch a short documentation film, and see the display of the works.
Renée was selected as the 2026 resident for the Artist in Residency program by the WVU Art in the Libraries Committee in collaboration with WVRHC archivists. Renée will receive a $1,000 honorarium and “Remain” will continue to be displayed at WVU Libraries throughout the 2026-2027 academic year.
This collaborative program is made possible by the Appalachian Community Development Association and The Oakland Foundation. For more information about Art in the Libraries or the Artist in Residency program, visit exhibits.lib.wvu.edu/mountain-air-artist-in-residency. To register for the public program, visit wvu.libcal.com/calendar/events/MountainAIR.
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MEDIA CONTACT: Ellis Willard
Director of Public Relations & Events
WVU Libraries
304-293-0306; ellis.willard@mail.wvu.edu