Contributors

An Indian-Pakistani Hong Konger, Fatema Abdoolcarim makes art, films, and writes. Her visual works have been shown at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, CPH:DOX, Locarno, Sundance, MajorDocs, and ZINEBI. In 2021 Fatema was awarded her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Her project, Hum, & After the Cut, intertwined personal narrative, history, and close looking into Islamic miniature paintings to reimagine representations of Muslim women, sexualities, and pleasures. Her spoken word piece, ‘Shh’, is published in the art-writing anthology, Intertitles (Prototype Publishing, 2021). Fatema’s essays can also be read in publications by The Brooklyn Rail and the Munch Museum (Oslo). She is currently working on her feature film, Hum.

Alison Ballance is an artist based in the UK who works across writing, drawing, watercolour, textiles, and photography. Ballance is also co-director of SILT: a research studio for ecological art materials, processes, and critical reading. Ballance believes in the radical potential of the imagination and the transformative effects of process-led image making.

Emma Bolland is an interdisciplinary artist-writer and an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. They have exhibited and performed widely and have work in public collections. They were the 2019 artist-writer in residence for the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield. Recent monographs include Instructions from Light (Joan, 2023) and Over, in, and Under (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). They are the co-editor of Intergraphia, a small press publishing at ‘intersections and edges’.

Lauren Berlant was George M. Pullman Professor at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on how affective structures in the US from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century formed attachments to nation, capitalism, intimacies, and socialities in everyday life. Her books include The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), The Female Complaint (2008), Cruel Optimism (2011), Sex, or the Unbearable, with Lee Edelman (2014), Desire/Love (2012), The Hundreds, with Kathleen Stewart (2019), and On the Inconvenience of Other People (2023).

Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist. Her books include The Undying and Garments Against Women.

Alice Butler is an interdisciplinary writer-scholar based in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical practices. This is central to recent projects, including the articles ‘Fan Letters of Love’ (in Fandom as Methodology, 2019) and ‘“Have you tried it with three?”: Ann Quin, Love Triangles, and the Affects of Art/Writing’ (in Capacious, 2021). Her monograph on Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller’s autofictional archives is forthcoming with Duke University Press. She is also at work on a new book that explores the minor intimacies of cloth in feminist art and writing practices.

Daniela Cascella is an Italian-British writer and editor, working with forms and transformations of critical writing that inhabit, echo, and are haunted by their subjects: literature, voices, concealments of the self. Her books articulate tensions and points of contact between the literary and the sonic, through experiments with form, voice, and ways of reading: Nothing as We Need It (Punctum Books/Risking Education, 2022), Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, An Imaginary Conversation, A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022), Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After the Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. (Zer0 Books, 2015), and En Abîme (Zer0 Books, 2012). www.danielacascella.com

Giulia Damiani is an artist, writer, and teacher based in Amsterdam working with performance. Her first performance for the stage, Heart Brake, will premiere in 2024 – supported by AFK Amsterdams Fonds Voor de Kunst. In 2020 she curated the show From the Volcano to the Sea: The Feminist Group Le Nemesiache in 1970s-1980s Naples for If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam. In 2022 she curated the same show Part II at Chelsea Space in London. Her edited book for If I Can’t Dance, Ritual and Display, came out in 2022.

Nia Davies is a writer and poet experimenting with embodied practice, translation, and performance. Her publications include All fours (Bloodaxe, 2017), editorship of the journal Poetry Wales (2014–2019), as well as several pamphlet and performance projects. Her second collection of poems, Votive Mess, will be published by Bloodaxe in 2024. She completed practice-based doctorate research into ritual poetry and performance in 2021. Nia co-curated Poetry Emergency festivals in 2018 and 2019 and has worked on intercultural literary collaborations and events around the world. She is currently working in interdisciplinary research at the University of Swansea.

Jade de Montserrat is an artist concerned with challenging structures of care in institutions and with the intersection of gender, race, class, and colonialism, often in the context of life in rural communities. She makes artworks that explore the vulnerability of bodies, the importance of recording and preserving history, and the tactile and sensory qualities of language. de Montserrat is a Tutor at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.

Kim Dhillon is the author of Counter-Texts: Language in Contemporary Art (Reaktion Books, 2022). She lives on Vancouver Island, Canada where she is a writer, art theorist, and bookseller.

Azadeh Fatehrad is Professor of Art and Public Policy at Teesside University. She is the co-founder of ‘Herstoriographies: The Feminist Media Archive Research Network’ and serves on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture at the University of Gothenburg. Her current projects are funded by the Nuffield Foundation and The British Academy. Fatehrad is executive board member at the European Artistic Research Network (EARN).

Natalie Ferris is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Women’s Writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945–1980 (Oxford University Press, 2022), and her critical work has appeared in Word & Image, Frieze, Tate Etc., and elsewhere. She is at work on a book that establishes a new genealogy for women’s writing through asemic writing and the experiences of post-war exile and displacement, and co-editing essay collections on women, modernism, and intelligence work and on life writing and secrecy. She is a co-coordinator of the Gender, Sexuality, Secrecy, and Ignorance Project at the University of Bristol.

Joey Frances is a poet, poetry organiser, and precariously employed university worker based in Manchester, UK, where he co-organises the reading series Peter Barlow’s Cigarette, and previously the festival Poetry Emergency. He has elsewhere written critically on works by Sean Bonney and Anna Mendelssohn, and is on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. His most recent poetry pamphlets can be read at pxxtry.com. He is committed to the notion that poetry is, or ought to be, a work of open collectivity.

Maria Fusco is a working-class writer from Belfast, based in Scotland. She has a personal chair in Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, formerly holding posts at the University of Edinburgh and Goldsmiths, University of London. She is founder/editor of The Happy Hypocrite journal for experimental art writing. She is writer/director of five large-scale performance works and author of eight sole-authored books, most recently the opera-film History of the Present (2023), co-made with Margaret Salmon with new composition by Annea Lockwood, and Who does not envy with us is against us, a book of essays about working-class-ness as method (Broken Sleep Press, 2023). Mariafusco.net

Catherine Gander’s academic books include Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013; IAAS Best Book Prize), Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (Manchester University Press, 2016), and The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She was the 2023 recipient of the triennial IAWIS Max Nänny Prize for Best Essay in Word and Image. Catherine’s current two book projects are Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics, and Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser. She is Associate Professor of American Literature at Maynooth University, Ireland, and Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies (2019–2024).

Carl Gent is an artist from Bexhill-on-sea, UK. Much of their work seeks to refictionalise the life of Cynethryth, eighth-century Queen of Mercia through a range of amateur dramatics, tabletop gaming, self-publishing cesspits, and the parading of decapitated kings in community carnivals. Together with Kelechi Anucha, they investigated the girly and divine links between folk and church song, and their ongoing collaborative practice with Linda Stupart has given birth to a range of live, published, and exhibited restagings of the 1990s video game Ecco the Dolphin. Their latest pamphlet, The Balls of Alban, was published by Monitor Books in 2022.

Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta, 2021), which received a Betty Trask Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta, 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lovebug, a book on the poetics of infection, was published by Peninsula Press in 2023.

Erin Manning is Professor of Fine Arts and Philosophy at Concordia University. Recent books include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke University Press, 2020), Out of the Clear (Minor Compositions, 2022) and The Being of Relation (forthcoming). She works at the intersection of the three ecologies – the environmental, the conceptual, and the social – with an emphasis on the aesthetico-political (3ecologies.org). Her artistic practice explores this transversality – a forthcoming exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (London, 2024) is called 100 Acres.

Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. She has published three monographs, most recently Writing Shame (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Her editorial publications include a collection of essays on Sarah Waters (Bloomsbury, 2013), a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press, 2015) on experimental women’s writing, and a co-edited collection of essays (with Nonia Williams), British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (EUP, 2019). Kaye was the UK editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing from 2017–2023 and is on the editorial board of Open Gender Journal in Germany.

Jessa Mockridge is an artist, writer, and library worker from Cape Town living in London. She works with DIY print publishing, performance, moving image, and sound. She’s interested in the power dynamics of media in relation to bodies and a politics of listening; a feminist ear that can also be an eye, skin, or fist. Jessa was the co-editor of PaperWork, an art writing print publication and event series. www.jessamockridge.com

Hatty Nestor is a researcher and writer. She has been writer-in-residence at Cove Park in Scotland (2019) and Jerwood Space, London (2017). Her writing has appeared in Frieze, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, The White Review, and other publications. Both her poetry pamphlet The Aching Poem (Boise State Press), and Ethical Portraits (Zero Books), were published in 2021. She is a Lecturer in Creative Non-Fiction at the University of Reading.

Nell Osborne is a writer, artist, and researcher, working on women’s experimental literature and feminist theory. In 2022, she completed a research PhD with the University of Manchester, titled ‘“Something in her demanded victimization and terror”: Theorising Violence and Sexuality in Women’s Experimental Writing of the 1960s and 1970s’.

Naomi Pearce is a writer and curator. Projects include Memory & Migration, The Warburg Institute, London and I Lay Waiting, Chapter, Cardiff, both 2024. Her writing has been published by Art Monthly, LA Review of Books, e-flux Criticism and The White Review, among others. From 2018 to 2022 she was a member of the Rita Keegan Archive Project, whose activity included an exhibition at South London Gallery and the publication Mirror Reflecting Darkly with MIT Press. She was awarded an AHRC-funded practice-based PhD from the University of Edinburgh, during which she developed her first novel, Innominate, published by MOIST in 2023.

Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Glasgow School of Art. Her books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024). Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is co-authoring Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2024).

Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her poetry collection States of the Body Produced by Love (2019) is published by Ignota Books. Her second collection will be published by Granta in 2024. Tentatively called Now Let’s Take a Listening Walk, it hazards a musical journey through history, myth, and sci fi. Nisha teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

Luke Roberts is a poet and writer. His books include Home Radio (the-87press, 2021), Glacial Decoys (Free Poetry, 2021), and Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945–1979 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). With Sam Ladkin he edited So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat Books, 2023), and with Amy Tobin he edited an expanded facsimile edition of Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami (Book Works, 2024). He works at King’s College London.

Kathleen Stewart writes ethnographic experiments to approach the composition of emergent worldings and their modes of knowing and sensing in refrains, rhythms, voices, tactilities, misfires, labours, and atmospheres. Her books include A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (Princeton University Press, 1996), Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007), The Hundreds co-authored with Lauren Berlant (Duke University Press, 2019) and Worlding (in preparation). She taught at the University of Texas, Austin.

Hannah Van Hove is Assistant Professor of the Honours Programme and Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She works on various aspects of Anglophone twentieth century and contemporary literature, with an emphasis on (late) modernism, experimental fiction, and women’s writing. At present, she is working on her first monograph entitled Unsettling Identity: Experiments in Subjectivity in Post-War British Women’s Fiction. Together with Andrew Radford, she is the editor of British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945–1975: Slipping Through the Labels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital, and performance. The author of eleven books (several co-written with AI that she has coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury, and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, the Whitworth, and Sample Studios Cork. She is the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature in Ireland and a UK Arts Foundation fellow, as well as the founder of the Twitter-based campaigns @read_women (2014–2018) and @noentry_arts. She is currently a MSCA postdoctoral fellow at NUI Maynooth.

Hilary White is an Irish Research Council, Government of Ireland 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, working on a project called Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence. A novella, Holes, was published with Ma Bibliothèque in February 2024. A monograph, The Visual Novel, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.