University of Northampton

Faculty Member, English Literature

Research Fellow

School of Arts

About

Zoë Brigley was recently named  by "The Manhattan Review" and "The Best American Poetry Blog" as one of the best young poets from the UK writing now. She is a Celtic writer (originally from Wales), but now lives in Pennsylvania. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and the English Association’s Poetry Fellows’ Award.

As an undergraduate, she studied on the Warwick Writing Programme in the UK, which has been endorsed by such luminaries as Salman Rushdie and A.L. Kennedy. She was in the first cohort of a pioneering BA in English Literature and Creative Writing.

Her debut full collection of poetry, "The Secret", was published by Bloodaxe (2007). "The Secret" was made a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was long-listed for the international prize for writers under 30, the Dylan Thomas Award. Poems from "The Secret" also won a translation fellowship from University of East Anglia and a Welsh writing bursary.

She is also a feminist scholar working in the area of violence against women. She edited the Routledge volume, "Feminism Literature and Rape Narratives" (2010) (with Sorcha Gunne). For more details see: <http://www.routledge.com/books/Feminism-Literature-and-Rape-Narratives-isbn9780415806084&gt;. She has a PhD in Gender and Literature and she is a research fellow at Northampton University, UK.

She has co-edited an anthology of women's poetry titled "Bluebeard's Wives" (2007, with Julie Boden), and she writes a blog, "The Midnight Heart": <www.blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley&gt;. Her writing has been published in magazines like "PN Review", "The Manhattan Review", "Poetry Wales", "Agenda", "The New Welsh Review" and "The Times Higher Education". She is a contributing editor for the British magazine of surreal art, "Polarity". 

Though much of her research analyzes contemporary poetry, she has also written or spoken about:
* the novel (Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf),
* the short story (Mahasweta Devi, Isabel Allende, Rosario Castellanos),
* film (the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre),
* visual art (Hannah Wilke, Frida Kahlo),
* the graphic novel or comic book (Alan Moore),
*and the popular song (an essay on Amy Winehouse in development).

As a PhD student, she attended research seminars with Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler and she has a strong commitment to employing feminist theory in her analysis, especially that of Irigaray, Butler, Julia Kristeva and Jessica Benjamin. These theoretical frameworks allow her to interrogate the performance of gender, sex, love and identity, especially in literature, art and film. 

She has taught both English Literature and Creative Writing at university level. Typical modules that she has convened include:
• Gender, Region and Poetry (MA in English Literature (Gender Component))
• Second Wave Feminism (Gender MA) 
• Feminism and the Body (Gender MA)
• Writing for Children (Creative Writing: Undergraduate)
• Imagined Worlds: Writing Stories (Creative Writing: Undergraduate)
• Singing the Earth: Poetry and the Environment (Comparative Literature: Undergraduate)
• Reading for Writers (Creative Writing: Undergraduate)
• Writing about Place (Creative Writing: Undergraduate)

She has also taught Creative Writing workshops for the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth; in inner city schools and institutions like Marlborough College; at festivals like Warwick Words and to poetry writing groups. She has read my own work at venues like the Poetry Cafe in London, Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Hay-on-Wye Guardian Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Y Senedd (The Welsh Assembly Building), the Dylan Thomas Centre, Warwick Art Centre, Midlands Art Centre and Oxfam Poetry Readings.

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