About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, funded by the British Academy. Until 2016, I taught literature and film at the University of Cambridge. My first book, A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) concerns the relation between poetry and politics in African-American avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the work of Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets' Workshop, the book reads Baraka alongside Calvin Hernton, Lorenzo Thomas, Ishmael Reed and others, addressing how these writers collectively and individually responded to such events as the death of Patrice Lumumba, the 1963 Civil Rights Campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1967 Newark Rebellion.

My current research focuses on American post-war queer poetry, particular the San Francisco Renaissance, the "Occult School" of Boston and New Narrative writing (Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian and others). I have published articles and book chapters on Wieners, Baraka, Sophie Podolski and others, and with Lauri (Ramey) Scheyer, I am co-editing a Reader of work by Calvin Hernton; other editorial work includes a feature on the poet Tom Weatherly recently published on Jacket 2. Further research interests include the relation between Marxism and black radical thought, particularly in Baraka's work; contemporary poetry; jazz, New Music and improvisation. I am also a poet and publisher, and have co-run the small press Materials since 2012.

Research interests

The New American Poetry, The British Poetry Revival, Jazz, Hip-Hop, 20th and 21st-century New Music and Improvisation, Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory; Contemporary Literature; Cinema; Relations between Poetry and poetics.

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate Modules

• EN304 Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature

Postgraduate Modules

• EN986 Forms of African-American Poetry

Selected publications

• “A Black Arts Poetry Machine”: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
• ‘Never Muted Heart: Tom Weatherly’. Jacket 2, University of Pennsylvania. 2019.
• ‘ “Suicide or Dynamite”: Sophie Podolski’s le pays où tout est permis’. Contemporary Women’s Writing, Vol.10, Issue 2, July 2016, 175-196
• ‘ “Everything that you do”: On the Poetry of Cecil Taylor’. Chicago Review, Issue 62.4 / 83: 01/02, Summer / Fall 2019.

Forthcoming

• “Zero Hour”: Simone White and D.S. Marriott. Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol.3, No.2, December 2019.
• “Hard Facts: Amiri Baraka and Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s. David Featherstone and Christian Hogsbjerg (eds.), The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic. Manchester University Press, 2020.
• ‘John Wieners and “the only one who ever mattered”.’ In Michael Kindellan (ed.), Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners. Forthcoming, Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. 2020.
• ‘ “A Gay Presence”: Publication and Revision in John Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol.’ Leila Kassir and Richard Espley (eds.), Queer Between the Covers. E-Book, Radical Collections Series, Senate House, University of London, 2020.

Poetry

• Relief Efforts (Brighton: Barque Press, 2018)
• To the Reader(London: Shit Valley, 2016)
• The Problem, The Questions, The Poem (Oxford: Tipped Press, 2015)
• Whatever You Think The Good Home(Scarborough, ME: Punch Press, 2014)
• [2010-present] Poems in Botch, Cambridge Literary Review, Contingencies, Datableed, Department, From London Out, Materials, Half Circle, Hi Zero, Romulan Soup Woman, Litter, Dusie, Internal Leg and Cutlery Preview, Gaff, Paradise Now, Sundial, No Infinite, The Paper Nautilus

Qualifications

• BA (Cambridge University, 2009)
• Phil (Cambridge University, 2012)
• PhD (Cambridge University, 2016)