Russell Thorburn is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program. He grew up in the Detroit area, where he worked with his bandmates in the garage on their music. Wayne State University Press published Somewhere We’ll Leave the World in 2017, which documented his time in Detroit and days as a poet-in-residence in the Mojave National Preserve. The Jukebox Was the Jury of Their Love,  book of rock poems in collaboration with another poet laureate, Rodney Torreson, is forthcoming.

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