Bryan Byrdlong

B. 1993
Bryan Byrdlong, a Black man with short black hair and a black long sleeve shirt sits in front of a white brick wall

Photo by Argel Rojo, Courtesy of Los Angeles Performance Practice

Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program. His poetry has appeared in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Apogee Journal, Pleiades Magazine, and other publications.

Byrdlong won Boulevard Magazine’s Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets and a Michael R. Gutterman Poetry Award as part of the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, and he received a Gregory Djanikian Scholarship from the Adroit Journal in 2020. In 2021, Byrdlong received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Byrdlong is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles. His debut collection Strange Flowers was published with YesYes Books in 2025.