I played my game for keeps -- For love, for poetry - Stanley Kunitz
So goes a poem I fell in love with over twenty years ago. Since then I've been playing the game of poetry "for keeps," as a writer, critic, scholar, educator, researcher, and citizen of the humanities in its myriad compositions.
Professionally, I am tenured Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading, where I lead courses in World literature, American literature, Eco-criticism, Women's literature, and Contemporary Poetry. In terms of my writing and scholarship, my current research focuses on refugee experiences of home-making, and I conduct this in tandem alongside my longer-standing and established work as an expert of New York School poetry. My work has been awarded international fellowships and grants, including most recently a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a British Academy grant, both of which supported my study of the refugee experience of home-making, and associated testimony of migration.
I am the author and or editor of four academic books: Spatial Poetics (OUP, 2018), a monograph on New York School poetry's forms, Joe Brainard's Art (EUP, 2019), an edited collection of essays on the text and image of the avant-garde artist, Migration Culture and Identity: Making Home Away (Palgrave, 2023), a collection of essays on home-making practices of refugees, and Synchronous Fireflies: Conversations with the New York School (forthcoming), an Oral History of the New York School. Other writings include articles and reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Magazine, the American Book Review, The Review of English Studies, Jacket, Empty Mirror, and PN Review, among others. I am currently working on completing a further two books which both attend to the refugee experience of displacement.
In my spare time, I organise free writing and reading workshops for refugees, in efforts to offer space for the processing of the trauma of displacement in art, pursing the possibility of cultivating refuge in writing.