Lila Bonow is a Black, multiracial, writer, artist, and teacher from a counterculture family in Seattle, Washington. She is completing her last year as an MFA student in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. At the university, she works as administrative support for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) and as a teaching assistant for Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance.
She is currently working on a manuscript of poetry with a focus on Blackness, family estrangement, desire, and sites of loss and erosion through the lens of film and the devastation of Pompeii. She was awarded the Jean Aloe Meyer Graduate Poetry Award in 2024 and 2025. Judge Cindy Juyoung OK selected “Love Poem” in 2024 for, “…its quiet and elegant regard of syntax as scene and limit." In 2025, Judge Derrick Austin selected “The Double Life,” and remarked: “The Double Life” succeeds by virtue of its neatness—a prose poem about the divided self—and how the poem undermines that containment. The poem is like a cell multiplying. The slipperiness of self and other is explored with gorgeous, cinematic panache.”
Bonow is also completing a short story collection. Her story, “The GOADs and I” was awarded first place for the 2025 Nordan-Kinder Award in Fiction by Alejandro Heredia, who remarked: “Equal parts absurd and heartfelt, ‘The GOADS and I’ follows an insecure father and janitor at the edge of his compassion. This is confident prose by a writer who’s arrived fully in their power.”
As a teacher, Lila Bonow has focused on mentoring writers of color (working with The Colorization Collective), the art of honoring and honing personal style (teaching Seminar in Composition for the University of Pittsburgh), and teaching the history and resistance of Black Americans and African diasporic people in the United States, rooted especially in the history of Pittsburgh’s Black communities (The University of Pittsburgh’s Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance course).
Photo by Ursula Rose