Finding Your Voice in the Machine

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, whose work brings experimental writing, computation, poetry, and archival imagination into sustained conversation. Bertram has received numerous honors, including being selected by Claudia Rankine as the Benjamin Saltman Award winner in 2010 and recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship in 2014. Their recent projects include Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 (2024), co-edited with Nick Montfort, and the AI-generated chapbook A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content (2024). Across books such as But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise (2012), Personal Science (2016), Travesty Generator (2019), and Negative Money (2023), Bertram explores how language systems shape identity, memory, race, and cultural expression. This interview offers insights into their perspective on creative practice, technology, and culture. Readers of Scholarly Editing will notice that their experience intersects with concerns about editorial theory and textual practice across print, digital, and creative forms. Bertram’s years of thinking and writing in the context of digital tools offer sharp insights into how writing, archives, and community intersect to create challenges and opportunities. Bertram’s work highlights a long and complex history of computational writing, often overlooked in the era of large language models. Inherent in their work and demonstrated by their experience is a recognition that new tools require greater effort from the individual user to engage with text, understand their origins, and assess their meanings. While the technology may enable different ways of practice, it also forces us to ask questions about how we understand and what we can create.