My Research

I'm a poet, critic, short story writer and photographer. My first collection of poetry, Public Dream, was published by Picador in 2007 and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Award. My second collection, Disinformation, was published by Picador in 2015 and shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Individual poems from both these books have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Edinburgh Review, Granta New Writing, and others. More recently, my poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review and the New York Review of Books. 

My first book of short stories, The Voice in My Ear, was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2020. A story from this, 'Broderie Anglaise', was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2015 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. A further story, 'Muster's Puppets Presents...', was published in Virginia Quarterly Review.

I have twice collaborated with the composer Martin Suckling, first on Emily's Electrical Absence, a series of poems and compositions inspired by the EU-funded PETMEM project to explore new computer processing technologies in 2018; and most recently on Black Fell, an interactive digital opera. 

I've published scholarly work on Elizabeth Bishop in the peer-reviewed American journal Twentieth Century Literature. “Mothers and Marimbas in ‘The Bight’: Bishop’s Danse Macabre" was awarded the journal’s Andrew J. Kappel Prize for Literary Criticism in 2015. I've also written many reviews and essays on poetry for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Edinburgh Review and others.

From 2024/25, I served as the Blackburn Distinguished Writer in Residence at Duke University in North Carolina. I am a founding member of the Text + Pix Collective, a research network of Duke faculty, Duke students and Triangle community members who share an interest in the relationship between the visual image and the written word.

My Teaching

I teach Creative Writing at Manchester at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including (in various years) the first-year Creative Writing workshop, second-year Fiction workshop, second- and third-year Poetry workshop, MA Writing Poems II, MA Fiction Workshop II, MA Forms of Writing II, and MA Reading Poems II. I supervise MA dissertations in both poetry and fiction.

My Research Supervision

I have supervised three Creative Writing PhDs to completion. Nathaniel Ogle's and Joseph Mungo Reed's novels were both subsequently published; Rowe Irvin was named an Observer Debut Novelist of the Year in 2025. I'm particularly keen to supervise poets and short story writers, and would be very glad to hear from potential candidates whose critical research interests include any of the following: 20th-Century and Contemporary British and Irish Poetry; 20th-Century and Contemporary American Poetry; the poetry and prose of Elizabeth Bishop and its legacies; the fiction of Alice Munro; female subjectivities and the short story; poetry's relationship to photographic practices and cultures. If you are a prospectiove PhD candidate who would like to discuss the possibility of supervision with me, please write to: [email protected]