Short Bio

Lauren Bullock is a queer, genderfluid Black and Vietnamese writer, performer, and teacher. Lauren’s work has been featured by AFROPUNK.com, Button Poetry, The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, The Human Rights Campaign, and more. Lauren is a Kundiman, Watering Hole, Pink Door, and Obsidian Foundation fellow as well as a Susan Laughter Meyers and Furious Flower Poetry Prize finalist. An educator of over 10 years, Lauren currently teaches middle school Language Arts and World Cultures in North Carolina. When not creating Lauren enjoys fighting crime as a costumed vigilante of many aliases.

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Long Bio

Lauren Bullock is a queer genderfluid multiracial writer, performer, teaching artist, events organizer, and model. As a child of a Vietnamese Amerasian mother and African American father, Lauren grew up learning the importance of words in expressing a unique identity. An avid lover of the power and delight of storytelling, Lauren’s first poem was part of an assignment to describe “living in a painting” in kindergarten and Lauren hasn’t stopped since, continuing on to other genres such as editorial columns and interviews.

Lauren’s first foray into spoken word was a result of the encouragement from a high school creative writing teacher, immediately taking to the marriage of a love for writing and performance. A 2014 honors graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a double major in English and Communications and a minor in Poetry, Lauren was awarded the Wallace Ray Peppers Award in Performance of African-American Literature as well as membership into the coveted Order of the Golden Fleece, UNC’s highest honor society.

Lauren’s first poetry slam win came in 2012, going on to win the grand slam and earning a spot on UNC’s first slam team as a result. Lauren also represented this team on the 2012 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) final stage as a part of the Best of the Rest showcase. In 2013 Lauren became the artistic director of UNC’s first-ever organization dedicated to poetry and slam, Wordsmiths, and captained the slam team to final stage at Barnard College in New York, New York. Since then Lauren has both coached the UNC slam team as well as participated in the Southern Fried Poetry Slam and National Poetry Slam as a member of the Durham, North Carolina-based Bull City in 2013 and Washington, D.C.-based Beltway in 2015.

Lauren developed and nurtured a love for organizing space for artistic expression as a staff member of former non-profit Sacrificial Poets. From 2014 to 2017 Lauren worked as a youth mentor and event organizer for the international Brave New Voices youth poetry festival, served on the organizational staff of the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam, and helped organize the 2016 and 2017 Words Beats and Life Festival. From 2016 to 2018 Lauren became one of the inaugural Future Corps Fellows for Youth Speaks. Lauren has also hosted and organized a variety of monthly local events, including the 2013 and 2014 seasons of the UNC Wordsmiths open mic and slam, the 2016 to 2018 open mic seasons for nationally acclaimed Busboys and Poets, and the 2019 to 2020 open mic seasons for Writing Wrongs Poetry and Queer Community Mic in Columbus, OH.

Pop culture has always been a soft spot for Lauren, from self-drawn comics and obsession with the anime Sailor Moon in elementary school, so it was natural to join the founding editorial staff of media platform Black Nerd Problems in 2014 as well as serving as poetry editor for pop culture literary magazine FreezeRay Poetry. Through this work Lauren has served on convention panels across the country, curated and organized various nerd and poetry intersecting events, and even appears quoted on the backs of various comic publications, including Marvel Comics’ Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and Dark Horse Comics’ Calla Cthulhu.

Lauren has also forayed into the world of fashion and modeling, appearing in publications such as Myssfit Magazine, Out-and-Out Magazine, and Gmaro Magazine as well as collaborating with the KissedByBo brand.

When not creating or teaching in the middle school classroom, Lauren enjoys fighting crime as a costumed vigilante of many aliases.