Poet, composer, and editor Russell Atkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Russell Atkins’s collections of poetry include the chapbooks and small-press books A Podium Presentation (1960), Phenomena (1961), Objects (1963), Objects 2 (1964), Heretofore (1968), The Nail, to Be Set to Music (1970), Maleficium (1971), and Whichever (1978). He also wrote two verse-plays or “poems in play forms”: The Abortionist and The Corpse, both published in Free Lance. His only full-length collection, Here in The (1976), was published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center. A collection of his papers is held at the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. Atkins died at the age of ninety-eight on August 15, 2024.