Russell Willis

Russell E. Willis writes from the borderlands where poetry meets philosophy, where technology presses against the human spirit, and where stories become a way of answering for the world we are making. Trained first as an engineer and later as a social ethicist, he has spent a lifetime tracing how technical systems shape our choices, our communities, and our sense of responsibility. His poems—over 300 of them—have appeared in journals and anthologies that prize clarity, honesty, and a deep attentiveness to ordinary life. His first collection, The Month the Baby Came, gathers these moments with a tenderness shaped by wonder and lineage. As an essayist and thinker, Russell writes about the moral pressures of the Polycene age, where artificial intelligence accelerates change faster than our institutions can understand it. His multi-volume series, Responsibility in the Age of AI, explores what it means to remain responsible, deliberate, and fully human inside systems that promise efficiency but erode agency. Whether writing poems or analyzing the ethics of autonomous technology, Russell moves with the same conviction: that language—carefully chosen, honestly offered—can slow the world enough for us to see one another clearly again.